Boudica, Dreaming the Bull.
By Manda Scott.
Back Cover.
THE SECOND BOOK IN THE EPIC STORY OF BRITAIN'S GREAT WARRIOR QUEEN.
Hailed as Boudica, the Bringer of Victory, Breaca now
leads her people's resistance against the occupying legions
of Rome. Opposing her is Julius Valerius, an auxilary
cavalry officer whose increasing brutality in the service
of his god and emperor cannot shield him from the ghosts of his past. Caught between them are two
children, pawns in a game of unthinkable savagery,
while in disttant Rome the emperor Claudius holds the balance of lives in his hands.

Continuing her acclaimed retelling of this great tale, Manda Scott has written a novel of uncompromising mastery that captivates the heart and challenges the mind
as Boudica and the man who calls himself Julius Valerius
confront each other - and their own inescapable destinies.

"Utterly convincing and compelling" Steven Pressfield.

"Breathtakingly good" Val McDermid.
"One of the boldest of recent adventures in historical fiction" Independent.

Manda Scott is a veterinary surgeon, writer and climber. Born and educated in Scotland, she now lives in suffolk with two lurchers and too many cats.
Manda Scott is known primarily as a crime writer.
Her first novel, Hen's Teeth, was shortlisted for the
Orange Prize. Her subsequent novels are Night Mares,
Stronger than Death and No Good Deed, for which she
was hailed as 'one of Britain's most important crime
writers'.
Dreaming the Eagle, the first book in the Boudica
series, is also published by Bantam Books and the third
book, Dreaming the Hound, by Bantam Press.
www.booksattransworld.co.uk

'Scott clearly has a stomach for combat. And in telling the
tale of Britain's great warrior queen and slayer of Romans,
this is an obvious prerequisite . . . Dreaming the Bull, like it's
predecessor, Dreaming the Eagle, does recreate something
precious from the murk ... by investing Boudica with a personality, and setting the action within a plausible and
detailed framework of Druids, dreamers, visions and Roman
invaders, Scott has fleshed out the intangible ... [it] builds to
a rollicking climax' Glasgow Herald

'Striking a perfect balance between historical fact and fiction
isn't easy, but Manda Scott, with her second novel in the
acclaimed "Boudica" series, manages to hit the mark ... Scott weaves a convincing web of fiction around the events of
Britain's Roman occupation ... [she] delves deeper than
your average historical writer into the psyche of her subject
to reveal a passionate warrior queen and her people prepared
to "rule Britannia" until the bitter end' Ink

'Britain's rapacious heroine in Roman times, the thorn of
legions, offers a gripping subject in the vibrant hands
of Manda Scott ... Scott's series is a cry for freedom cloaked
in lyrical and sensitive prose' Oxford Times

'Scott's descriptions are full of atmosphere and evocation
... We can feel the power of the pagan rituals almost as if we were participating in them' Sunday Herald

Also by Manda Scott.
HEN'S TEETH.
NIGHT MARES.
STRONGER THAN DEATH.
NO GOOD DEED.
BOUDICA: DREAMING THE EAGLE.
BOUDICA: DREAMING THE HOUND.


MANDA SCOTT.
BOUDICA, DREAMING THE BULL.

BANTAM BOOKS
LONDON JOHANNESBURG TORONTO SYDNEY AUCKLAND

DREAMING THE BULL
A BANTAM BOOK: 0 553 81407 9
Originally published in Great Britain by Bantam Press,
a division of Transworld Publishers

PRINTING HISTORY

Bantam Press edition published 2004
Bantam edition published 2005
13579108642

Copyright  Manda Scott 2004

The right of Manda Scott to be identified as the author of
this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All the characters in this book are fictitious,
and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
is purely coincidental.

Condition of Sale
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,
by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or
otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other
than that in which it is published and without a similar
condition including this condition being imposed on the
subsequent purchaser.

Set in 11/13pt Sabon by
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regulations of the country of origin.


For Kathrin.


CONTENTS.
Acknowledgements.
Maps. (not Transcribed).
Prologue.
I: Autumn-Winter AD 47.
II: Summer-Early Autumn AD 51.
III: Autumn-Winter AD 51.
IV: Autumn AD 54.
Author's Note.
Characters and Pronunciation of Names.
Bibliography.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.

Heartfelt thanks to H.J.P. 'Douglas' Arnold, Roman
military historian and astronomer, for his unfailingly
cheerful reading of the various drafts of this novel and
its predecessor and for his insight, honesty and
accuracy; without him, the writing and research of the
Boudican era would have been immeasurably harder
and the result far less coherent. As ever, there are places
where I chose to ignore his advice and any inaccuracies
of fact or concept are entirely my responsibility. Thanks
to Robin and Aggy for input on caves and for general
support in the writing. Thanks of an entirely different
nature to Debs, Naziema, Carol and Chloe who, at
various times and in various ways, kept the realities
together and to Tony, for friendship, grounding and
thoughtful sanity. Thanks in perpetuity to my agent,
Jane Judd, and especially to my editors on both sides of
the Atlantic for their care, insight and stamina. Finally,
thanks to all those who have shared the dream and do
so still.

Listen to me. I am Luain mac Calma, once
of Hibernia, now Elder of Mona, adviser
to the Boudica, Bringer of Victory, and I
am here to teach you the history of your
people. Here, tonight, by this fire, you will
learn what has come before. This is who
you were, if we win now, this is who you
could be again.

In the beginning, the gods ruled the land
and the ancestor-people lived in their care.
Briga, the three-fold Mother, held them
through birth and death, and Nemain, her
daughter, who shows her face each night in
the moon, gave succour between these two
journeys. Belin, the sun, warmed them,
and Manannan of the seas gave them fish.
The ancestors saw that this island of Mona
was sacred to all the gods and for untold
generations warriors, dreamers and singers
from the tribes have come to sit here in this
great-house and learn.

With time, the tribes grew, each with its
own strengths. Rome, too, was growing;
her traders sought hides, horses and
hounds, tin and lead, jewellery and corn
and they found them here in abundance.

It was greed for corn, for silver, and for
our people as slaves that brought Julius
Caesar to our shores. He came twice and
each time the dreamers of our ancestors
called on Manannan to send a storm to
wreck his ships and drown his men. The
first time, Caesar barely escaped with his
life. A year later, returning, he fought a
small battle against the heroes of the east,
at the end of which they agreed to talk
with him rather than spill more blood. He
offered them trading treaties and
monopolies on the wines and enamels
from Gaul and Belgica and those who saw
their future in trade, and saw no threat
from Rome, agreed.

We lived in peace for nearly one
hundred years. In that time, a single man
came to rule over the tribes on either side
of the great river: Cunobelin, the Hound
of the Sun, dealt skilfully with Rome.
While the Caesars Augustus and Tiberius
marched their legions out over Gaul and
the Germanies, Cunobelin sent envoys
promising peace and trade, but not so
much of either that he offended the tribes
who hated Rome and who might otherwise
have come to view him openly as an
enemy.

While Cunobelin lived, there was peace.
There were many among our elders and
grandmother-councils who watched the
Roman subjugation of Gaul and feared
that we would be next. Amongst those
were the Eceni, the Boudica's people.
Their lands bordered those of the Sun
Hound and, although they were not at war
with him, they refused to trade in anything
Roman, nor would they sell to Rome their
horses, hides or hunting hounds, which
were the best the world has ever seen.

The Eceni were in conflict with the
Coritani and it was in killing a Coritani
spearman that Breaca, who became the
Boudica, won her first kill-feather She was
twelve years old and still a child, but the
warrior showed in her clearly. Breaca's
half-brother, Ban, was -younger, but his
head was cooler and his heart perhaps
more open. The gods loved Ban and sent
him dreams of a power unknown since the
time of the ancestors. Breaca loved him as
any sister loves a brother.

In Cunobelin's lands, life was not peaceful;
the Sun Hound set his own three sons
against each other, thinking to teach them
by constant competition. Togodubnos was
eldest and could hold his own. Amminios,
the middle son, thrived in the constant
conflict but Caradoc, the youngest, and
the most ardent warrior, loathed his father
and escaped to be with his mother's
brother, a seaman.

The gods, who know these things better
than we, caused Caradoc's ship to be
wrecked on the eastern shores and the lad
was washed up, half-drowned, at Breaca's
feet. Thus began one of the greatest
alliances in our history, although it took
them years to come together and without
war it might never have happened.

With Caradoc was shipwrecked a
Roman, Corvus, who came to know the
Eceni and care for them. In the spring after
the shipwreck, Breaca and her warriors
escorted Caradoc and this Corvus south to
the lands of the Sun Hound. They were
well received and treated with honour, but
for Ban, who fell into a game of Warrior's
Dance with Amminios and beat him.
Above all else, Amminios hated to lose and
it was this that spurred him to mount an
attack on the returning Eceni.

They fought a battle at the Place of the
Heron's Foot and many were slain. The
greatest loss was the boy, Ban, against
whom Amminios held his grudge. Breaca
saw her brother slain and his body taken
by Amminios and although the dreamers
have searched all the pathways to the
other world, none has yet found his soul
that it might be returned to the gods.

Four years ago, two things happened to
change the peace of the tribes: Cunobelin
died, leaving his sons to fight amongst
themselves, and across the Ocean a new
emperor came to power in Rome. Claudius
was weak and had a need to prove to the
senate and the people that he had the skills of Julius Caesar, whom they still revere.
He sent four legions and four wings of cavalry against us. Forty thousand men
and their horses, servants, engineers and
doctors took ship for Britannia.

The battle of the invasion lasted two
days and will be told for ever round the fires. A thousand heroes lost their lives on the first day, for the death of ten times that
many Romans. Late in the evening, when
we were winning, Togodubnos and Caradoc found themselves trapped,- unable
to advance or retreat. Their deaths were
certain until Breaca led a charge that
smashed the Roman lines and freed those
caught within. It was then that she earned
the name by which we know her: Boudica,
Bringer of Victory.

Togodubnos was wounded and died
that night but his brother Caradoc took
up leadership of his warriors and, with
Breaca, prepared to fight the next day. They would have fought without rest until
all were dead or we had victory but the
gods deemed it otherwise, sending an
entire legion across the river in the early
morning so that there was no time to make
a stand against them.

We dreamers called a mist and the gods
demanded that Breaca and Caradoc lead
the warriors and children to safety - without
them, you would not be alive and
Rome would rule unhampered. They did not wish to leave the field of battle but
Macha, who had been mother to Ban and
was more than a mother to Breaca,
demanded it. Macha herself stayed to hold
the fog and it lifted only with her dying, at
the very end when all of our people had
escaped.

And so we live now with the results
of that. Rome marched north and
captured Cunobelin's dun. They call it
Camulodunum and have built a fortress there of a size to numb the mind. Breaca
and Caradoc fled west and now, with the
support of Mona and the dreamers, hold
the western lands, killing all Rome sends
against us. The time is right for our victory. The old governor who led the invasion will be recalled shortly. Replacing
him is Scapula, a general renowned for his
savagery. But between one and the other is
a space of time when the Roman legions in
Britannia are leaderless and we will hit
them then, when they are weakest, and
perhaps drive them back into the sea.

One thing more: I have spoken of Breaca's brother Ban and his death at the
hands of Amminios, brother to Caradoc. I have travelled in Gaul and I am coming to
believe that Ban did not die, but was taken
into slavery by Amminios. Later, escaping,
he joined the cavalry, serving under
Corvus, the Roman officer who had been
shipwrecked in Eceni lands and was his friend. A man of Ban's description, showing
knowledge of our people and great
skill with horses, fought in the invasion
battles and serves now with the cavalry at
Camulodunum.

If this man is Ban, if he did join the
enemy cavalry, it can only be because he
believed that Amminios had slain Breaca
and all his family. Left thus alone, he might
easily have considered that he had nothing left to live for.

He must know otherwise now - the
Boudica is renowned from the west coast
to the Least and in all ways she is unmistakable. Nevertheless, this man has not
come to us asking help and forgiveness. I
believe his true commitment to Rome and
all it stands for was made after the second
day of the invasion battle, when he found
his mother's body burning on a funeral
pyre. If he holds himself responsible for
her death, then it may be that he fears himself
beyond redemption, for ever cut off
from his gods, his people and his closest
family.

If I am right, this is a man to watch and
fear. The boy that I knew was a dreamer to
match the power of his mother and a
warrior almost to match his sister; if Ban.
has lost his connection with the gods and
the love of his family, then he will be damaged beyond all knowing. Damaged men
are ever the most dangerous, to themselves
and others. We stand against them at our
peril.

I do not believe the gods would cast out
one of their own, however appalling his
crimes, and I am seeking ways to find Ban
and to speak with him. If I am to do so, it
is imperative that Breaca, Airmid and
Caradoc continue to believe him dead.

You, here, are in the great-house under
the care of the gods. I swear you now to
secrecy; only on my death or that of Ban
can you speak freely and then only to
Airmid, who will know what to do. For
now, you may sleep, and dream, and know
that the gods take care of you.

PROLOGUE.

He had been branded once before, long ago, when
his name was not Julius Valerius. Then, Ban had
fought the men who held him down and it had
been done badly so that the wound had festered
and he had nearly died. Now, kneeling tied and
blindfold in the claustrophobic dark of a wine
cellar, beneath a house that was less than three
years old and with the snuffed wicks of the candles
sending rank smoke into the dark, he yearned for
the touch of the iron. When the masked centurion
wiped the wine down the line of his breastbone
and pressed his thumb in the centre to mark the
spot, he leaned forward to meet the pain.

He had forgotten how bad it would be. The
shock was blinding. Fire, and something worse
than fire, wrapped his heart, closing tight, like a
fist. It wrenched at his breath in a way that
wounds taken in battle had never done. He forced
himself to silence but need not have done; the
noise of one man was lost in the echoing chant of
forty male voices. The stench of burned flesh
drowned in a flood of sweet smoke as someone
threw a fistful of incense onto the brazier.

Later, he wondered at the expense of that:
frankincense cost more than its own weight in
gold. At the time, he only knew that, however
briefly, the pain of the fire consumed the other
greater pain of his soul and it was for this that he
had come to the god. He threw himself into it,
riding the heat that spread from his chest until it
drew him out of himself and he watched his body
from a place apart, one with the fire and yet
separate. At its height, when the bearable became
unbearable, someone standing behind stripped the
blindfold from his eyes and cut the cords at
his wrist and someone else lit the seven lamps
before the sun-disc so that, in deepest darkness
and blinding pain, the god's light offered solace.
He would have liked to have accepted the offer,
to have fallen into the waiting, welcoming arms of 
the deity, to have known peace and certain 
salvation. The men branded on either side of him did exactly that. From his left, he felt the shudder
of flesh that matched exactly the moment of 
surrender when a horse first accepts the bridle. 
From his right he heard a whimpered exhalation,
as of a man at the climax of love. For these, and
the others beyond them, divine joy engulfed all
pain, erasing its threat for ever.

It was what he had been promised and what he
had craved. In an agony that was more of the heart than the body, he cried aloud in the void of
his soul for the voice of the god. He was not
answered. Too soon, the iron was gone, leaving only the ache of scorched flesh and a curl of smoke
that rose to join the taint of those who had been
branded with him.

The centurion stepped back, swinging the reddening iron. The double curve of the raven blurred and steadied and lit the space between
them. Hidden eyes regarded Valerius from behind
the god's mask.

'Know now that you are my Sons under the Sun,
the last for whom I will be Father and special for
ever because of it. I will leave this province soon,
with the governor, travelling with him to Rome to 
accept such postings as the emperor chooses to
bestow. I will be a centurion of the second cohort
of the Praetorian Guard. Should you come to
Rome, make yourselves known to me. The new
governor will arrive with next month's first
auspicious tide. With him will come new officers
to replace those who are leaving and new recruits
to replace those we have lost. Meantime, the welfare
of this province, the honour of our emperor
and of the legions is in your hands and those of
Your brothers under the god.

'You are his now, first and foremost. Before the
legions, before all other gods, you belong to
Mithras to death and beyond. He is a just god; ask
and he will give you strength; weaken and he will
destroy you. By the brand will you know and care
for each other and if the god grant that we meet
again, I will know you by it also.'

They were seven in the row, naked as infants,
newly marked and newly named. Not one spoke.
On the far side of the room, a man's voice set up 
the chant of the newborn. It was joined by others
and others and, last, by the new initiates until the
full weight of forty-nine voices surged onto the
walls and fell inwards, deafeningly. As the sound
faded, a single lamp was lit beneath the image of
the god. The centurion turned and saluted. Behind
him, the others did likewise. From his place above
the candle on the northern wall, smiling Mithras,
capped and caped, caught his bull and drew his
blade along its throat.

AUTUMN-WINTER AD 47.

I.

Only the children sleep on the night before battle
and sometimes not even them. On the night before
the Roman governor of Britannia took ship and
left for ever the land he had conquered, two
thousand warriors and half as many dreamers
gathered awake on a hillside, less than a morning's
ride from the most westerly of the frontier forts.
Singly and in groups, as their gods and their
courage dictated, they prepared themselves for
war on a scale not seen in the four years since
Rome's invasion.

Breaca nic Graine, once of the Eceni and now of
Mona, sat alone at the edge of a mountain pool. She tossed a pebble in the palm of her hand and
sent it skipping over the water.
'For luck.'

The stone bounced five times, shattering the
moon's reflection. Shards of broken light scattered
into darkness and were lost. The river ran on 
unheard, the music of its passing drowned beneath
the stutter of bear claws played on hollow skulls
nearby. The light of a thousand restless campfires
gilded the water's edge and smoke hazed the air
above it. Only by the river was there solitude and
darkness and the peace to ask favours of the gods.

'For courage.'
The second pebble clipped the edge of the moon
and was lost. On the unseen slopes behind, the 
skull-drums reached a crescendo. A woman's voice
called out in the language of the northern 
ancestors. Other voices answered, grunting, and
the un-rhythm of the drums changed. It was not good to listen too closely to that, over the years,
more than one soul had been lost in the mesh of
woven bone-sounds and had never found its way 
home.

'For Briga's care in battle.'
The third stone, more accurate than those before 
it, bounced nine times and sank into the moon's heart, carrying the prayer directly to the gods without the intermediary of the river. If a warrior
believed in omens, it was a good one. Breaca, known 
as the Boudica, sat as the moon settled again and
was whole, a crisp half-circle of silver lying stil on a 
bed of moving black.

She picked up a fourth stone. It was wider and
flatter than the others and bounced smoothly on
her palm. She breathed a different prayer into it, 
one for which tradition did not supply the words.

'For Caradoc and for Cunomar, for their joy 
and their peace if I am taken in battle. Briga,
mother of war, of childbirth and of dying, take
care of them for me.'

It was not a new prayer; in the three and a half
years since her son was born, she had spoken it
countless times in the silence of her mind in those
moments before the first clash of combat when
everything and everyone she loved must be put
aside and forgotten. The difference now, in the
rushing dark by the river, with the chaos of
preparation held temporarily at bay, was that she
had spoken for the first time aloud and had felt
the prayer clearly heard. She was beside water,
which was Nemain's, and on the eve of battle,
which was Briga's, and the gods were alive and
walking on the mountainside, called in by the
scores of dreamers whose ceremonies lit the night
sky.

After nearly four years of despair, she could feel
the promise of freedom just within reach if bone
and blood and sinew could be pushed hard
enough and far enough to make it happen.
Knowing a hope greater than any she had felt
since the invasion, the Boudica drew back her arm
to throw her stone. 

'Mama?'

'Cunomar!' She turned too fast. The pebble
skittered over the water and was lost. A child
stood on the river bank above her, tousled from
sleep and stumbling uncertainly in the dark.

She reached up and lifted her son by the waist,
bringing him down to the water's edge where he
could stand safely. 'My warrior, you should be 
sleeping, why are you not?'

Blearily, he rubbed a small fist in his eye. 'The
drums woke me. Ardacos is calling the she-bears  to
help him. He's going to fight the Romans. Can
I watch the ceremony?'

Cunomar was not quite four years old and had 
only recently begun to grasp the enormity of war.
Ardacos was his latest hero, second only to his
father and mother in the pantheon of his gods.
The small, savage Caledonian was the stuff
of childhood idolatry. Ardacos led the band of
warriors dedicated to the she-bear; they fought
always on foot and largely naked and surpassed
all others in the stalking and hunting of the enemy
by night. The skull-drums were his, and the chanting that accompanied them.

Breaca said, 'We're all going to fight the Romans
but, no, I think the ceremony is sacred and not for
our eyes unless they call us in. When you are older,
if the she-bear so grants, you can join with
Ardacos in his ceremonies.'

The boy's face flushed in the fire glow, suddenly
awake. 'The she-bear will grant it,' he said. 'She
must. I'll join Ardacos and together we will drive
the legions into the outer Ocean.'

He spoke with the conviction of one who has
not yet known defeat, nor even considered it
possible. Breaca had not the heart to disappoint
him. 'Then your father and I will be glad to save you some Romans to fight. But in the morning we
must kill the ones in the fort beyond the next
mountain, and before that Ardacos and two of his
warriors must make the land safe for us. It may be
he has need of me in a part of his ceremony. If I go
to him, you must go to bed first. Will you do that?'

'Can I sit on the grey battle mare before you go to kill the legions?'

'Yes, if you're good. See, your father's here. He'll hold you while I go to Ardacos.'

'How did you know-?' The child's face was awash with awe. Already he believed his mother
part-way to divinity; for her to predict the appearance
of his father out of the maelstrom of the night
was only another step to godhood.

Breaca smiled. 'I heard his footsteps,' she said.
'There's nothing magical in that.' It was true; more
than Cunomar, more than any other living being,
she knew the tread of this one step. In the chaos of
battle, in the silence of a winter night, she could
hear Caradoc walk and know where he was.

Now, he waited at the top of the bank. With the
firelight behind, his face was invisible and only his
hair was lit. Spun gold flickered around his head
so that he looked as might Camul, the war god, on
the eve of battle, or Belin who daily rode the
mounts of the sun. It was a night to sustain such
fancies and the gods would not be offended.

In the voice of men, Caradoc said, 'Breaca? The
she-bears have called your name. Are you ready?'

'I think so. If you will take care of your son, we
can find out.' She passed Cunomar up to the waiting
arms and hoisted herself up by the hazel roots.

'Briga gives me luck and her care should the luck
fail. It appears I may have to find my own courage.'

The fourth stone was forgotten, deliberately so.
There was no way to predict what the gods might
make of it. Breaca could not imagine them
exacting retribution from a child for his mother's
failure to cast a stone truly and Caradoc made his
own fate in battle. She had seen him fight too
often to believe he could die before her.

She pulled herself up the last half-length of the
bank. Caradoc's face was lined by lack of sleep
and the weight of leadership. He hugged her 
lightly. 'The she-bears believe you have courage
to spare. Tonight would not be a good time to
disillusion them.'

Breaca grimaced. 'I know. To them I am god-filled and can never die. You and I know the truth;
courage is too fickle to be held fast from one day 
to the next. Like sweeping the moon in a fishing
net, the water sifts through and the light stays as it
was. Each time I ride into battle I believe it will be
the last.'

She should not have said that. The fourth stone
was not fully forgotten and Caradoc could read
her as well as she could him. He asked, 'Does the
coming battle feel bad to you?'

'No more than it ever does. And it doesn't
matter. There are enough in Mona's council who
know what to do if we do not survive.'

'Thank you. I will fight better believing they
will not be called on.' He kissed her, a brief press
of dry lips on her cheek, and then, quickly, 'If
Ardacos can do as we need, fewer may die.'

'We can hope so. Take care of Cunomar. I can
find the she-bears on my own.'

Away from the river, the hillside was alive with
warriors painting themselves and each other,
weaving their warrior's braids and fixing at their
temples the kill-feathers that gave notice to the
gods of the numbers of enemy already slain.

Ardacos' she-bears formed a circle on the
western slope of the mountain, sheltered by lateberried
thorns. The night was alive with the clatter
of bear claws played on bone-white skulls and it
was hard to hear anything beyond the soft, insistent
absence of rhythm. The sound was a river
that washed into the mind and soul and carried
them to places Breaca had never been, or wished to
go. Older than the ancestors, it spoke directly to the
gods, promising them blood in return for victory
and demanding courage and something greater
than courage as its price.

Knowing exactly the limits of her own courage,
Breaca nic Graine, known throughout the tribes as
the Boudica, bringer of victory, stepped forward
into the firelight.

The men and women of the she-bear made a
circle around her. In daylight, she could have
named each one. They were her friends, her closest
comrades, warriors for whom she would die in
battle and who would, without pause or question,
die for her in return. Lit by the leaping flames,
those who circled her were barely human and she
could not see Ardacos at all.

'Warriors of the she-bear, we have need of you.'

'Ask.' The voice was a bear's, carried on a wave
of drumming. 'The bear lives to serve, but only
one whose heart is great enough to know the risk
may ask.'

'The gods will test my heart as they test yours.'
The words, like the rhythms, were the ancestors',
old beyond imagining. Pitching her voice above
the rattling claws, she said, 'We who fight battles
in daylight ask the aid of those who hunt men by
night. There is a task for which no others are
suited. There is danger beyond that which any 
others can face. There is need of one who can 
track and one who can hunt and one who can kill
and leave not a single one of the enemy alive. Can
you do this? Will you do it?'

The dance throbbed. The drums tugged at her
soul. Waves of passion, of regret, of love and loss
and pity scored her heart. Fighting for outward
calm, she said again, 'Warriors of the she-bear.
Can you do this? Will you do it?

A single bear-robed figure shuffled forward, It
could have been man or woman, both or neither.
In a voice Breaca had never known, it said, 'We
can. We will. We do.'

'Thank you. May Nemain light your way, may
Briga aid your fighting and the bear guard the
honour of your dying. I am grateful - truly.'

The last sentence was hers alone, not given by
the generations before. Breaca stepped sideways,
leaving open the place before the fire.

On a soft, husking cough, the skull-drumming
stopped. The circle opened and disgorged into its
centre a decurion of the Roman cavalry and two
of his auxiliaries. As if under Roman orders, the
three marched to stand before the fire.

The officer stood a little ahead of his men and
was more richly dressed. His cloak was a deep
liver red, striped at the hem in white, and his
chain-mail shirt caught the moonlight and made
of it stars. His helmet gave him a little extra
height, but did not bring him close to the stature
of the two warrior-auxiliaries who flanked
him, each a hand's length taller. Beneath their
helmets, the face of each was painted in white
lime; circles around the eyes and knife-straight
lines beneath each cheek made them other than
human. All three smelled, overpoweringly, of bear
grease, stoat's urine and woad.

They made a line before the fire. Each bowed a
little and gave something himself, or herself - at
least one of the disguised warriors was a woman -
to the flames. The offerings flashed as they
burned, giving off the greens and blues of
powdered copper and the whiff of scorched hair.
When the fire was quiet, all three turned and lifted
their cavalry cloaks so it might be seen by their
peers that, beneath the chain mail of their disguise,
they were naked and that the grey woad that was
their protection under the gods coated all of their
skin. A small incision on the left forearm of each
bled a little into the night, black against the silvering
grey. The skull-drums chattered a final time in
recognition, approval and support. When they
stopped, a measure of magic departed the night.
It was hard to move, as if the earth had become
less solid a while and, returning, the pressure of it 
bruised the soles of the feet. Breaca moved further
away, giving room before the fire to the drummers
and dancers; they had further to return and would
feel the strangeness more strongly. The enemy
decurion followed her.

'Am I Roman?'

The man tipped his head slightly, and by that,
by his voice and by his lack of height, Breaca knew
him. She smiled. 'Ardacos, no, no-one could
imagine you Roman. But by the time the enemy
are close enough to realize it, they will be dead.'
She laid her palm on the hilt of his sword, the
only part of him another could touch without
desecration until he had killed his foes or died in
the attempt. 'You know that if it were possible, I
would go in your stead.'

'And you know that there are some places
where the Boudica excels and others where the
she-bear is all that will suffice.'

Behind the skull paint, Ardacos' eyes wer
bright as the stoat's that was his dream. He had
been her lover for a while between Airmid and
Caradoc; he knew her as well as any man, knew
the weaknesses, real and imagined, that she took
pains to hide from the greater mass of warriors.
He said, 'I couldn't lead the warriors down the
hill tomorrow if their lives and mine depended on
it. I couldn't stand with my back to the sunrise and
speak to them with the voice of Briga so that they
believe themselves touched by the gods and fit to
defeat any number of legions. I couldn't dream of
riding alongside Caradoc in battle, weaving the
wildfire so that the weak and the wounded find
new heart and can fight where before they thought
themselves dead.' Less soberly, he said, 'The gods
give to each of us different gifts. I could not be the
Boudica, but also I do not wish it. You should not
wish yourself a she-bear. Be grateful you don't
spend your life with the stink of bear grease in
your nostrils.'

She wrinkled her nose. 'Do you think I don't?'

'No. You think you don't, and I know you don't
know the first part of it.' He grinned, showing
white teeth. He, too, was forbidden to touch any
one
but those with whom the night's oaths had
been spoken until at least the first of the enemy
was dead. Deliberately, he kept his hands folded
across his sword belt. 'We must go while the night
is still with us. The Romans are soft and they
drink wine in the darkness to give themselves
courage.' More formally, he said, 'Be of good
heart. We cannot fail.'

'And if you do, the bear will take you.'

'Of course. It is the promise we make. But it is
made gladly.' He turned, sending his cloak
spinning. 'Wait by the fire. We will return not long
after dawn.'


II.

The air stank of woad and bear grease and thus of
conflict. For a child conceived in battle and born
into war, it was the familiar smell of childhood, as 
common as the scent of roasting hare, if less
pleasant.  Cunomar, son of the two greatest warriors his world had ever seen, clung to the mane of his mother's grey battle mare and tried, 
surreptitiously, to breathe through his mouth. His
mother's arms kept him safe on the horse's neck in that place, ahead of the saddle, where brave
children rode if they were good and did not ask
too many questions of those preparing for war.

It was hard to be good. The night had been alive
with a shimmering danger and few of the adults
had time for a child. Only Ardacos had said good
things but then he had needed to begin his
ceremony and when he had finished, the man who
emerged was somebody else.

Cunomar liked Ardacos. One of the child's
earliest memories was of the small, dark-skinned
warrior with the creased face bending over him in
firelight, signing with his fingers the wards of protection
before lifting him and carrying him away
to hide in the dark of a river valley where they lay
together under the hanging boughs of a hazel tree
with running water at their feet and boulders on
either side for protection. Cunomar' remembered
little else but that the night had been unusually
long and rain had fallen through most of it, masking
the sounds of fighting so that he could not tell
how close the enemy, had come, or how sorely the
wards had been tested.

Ardacos had been the real protection, greater
than the wards. He had crouched next to
Cunomar through the night with his battle knife
drawn; together they had listened to the sounds of
killing. When dawn came, the little man had
walked soft-footed into the rain and returned with
the newly severed head of an enemy soldier, to
prove it was safe to come out. It was then
Cunomar had decided that when he was older, he
would be a warrior like Ardacos and would fight
under the mark of the she-bear, coating himself in
bear's grease and woad that the enemies' eyes
might not see him, nor their blades bite.

In the year since, Cunomar had learned to
recognize the distinctive patter of claws on a skull
that called the warriors of the she-bear to the start
of their ceremony. He had watched exactly how
the little man mixed white lime with river clay and
used it to make his hair stand up on his head so
that he seemed taller and more fierce, and how he
painted rings round his eyes and lines on his
cheeks in the shape of a skull to warn his foes of
impending death. The result was terrifying and
Cunomar was not surprised that the enemy fell
dead before the warriors of the she-bear. The only
surprise was that they kept coming back and had
not yet learned to return whence they came and
leave for ever the land that was not theirs.

They would do so soon, everything and everyone said so. The promise had been heard daily
through the summer in the quiet talk of warriors
preparing for war and in the certainty of the
dreamers, only now the woad said it in a way that
could not be ignored. After a while, when the
stench of it seemed less overpowering, Cunomar
realized the extra sharpness was of the stoat,
which was Ardacos' dream, and that the
bear-warrior had mixed it in to make him
stronger.

Even without that, Cunomar would have known
that this battle was going to be greater than the
ones that had marked the high points of his life so
far. Alive with a gilded pride, he had heard his
mother speak to all those gathered on the hillside. As-
a cold dawn sharpened the air and Nemain, the
moon, lowered into her bed in the mountains,
Breaca had stood on the back of her mare  and
addressed the massed ranks of warriors and
dreamers, naming them all Boudegae, bringers of
victory, and,swearing before them that she would
fight for as long as it took to rid the land of the
invader.

She had seemed truly like a goddess then; the
mist had parted and the first slanting rays of
the sun had lit her from behind, melding her with
the battle mare so that two became one, a thing
greater than either apart. The light had burnished
her hair, making copper of the flaming bronze,
casting in relief the warrior's braid at the side and
the single silver feather woven within it that
marked the scores of the enemy who had died at
her hand. The serpent-spear on her shield had
glistened wetly red, as if freshly painted with
Roman blood, and the grey cloak of Mona had
lifted behind her in the wind. At the end, she
had raised her blade high, promising victory, and
there was not one among those gathered who
doubted they could achieve it.

They had not cheered for her because the enemy
was too close and might be alerted but Cunomar
had seen the flash of a thousand weapons raised in
salute. He had ached with pride but this time, perhaps
because he was older and understood more,
he felt the knifing pang of a new fear that had
nothing to do with the possibility of his mother's
death or even the closeness of war but was rooted
instead in the awful possibility - even the probability
- that the fighting might be over before he
was old enough to join it.

Watching the warriors begin to disperse, he had
prayed silently to Nemain and to Briga, her
mother, and to the soul of the she-bear that the
war into which he had been born might not end 
before he was of an age to carry a weapon and win
honour for himself and his parents.

Cunomar pushed himself back against his
mother's chest until the links of her mail shirt
pressed cold on his neck and he felt the shivered
thrill of danger. Grinning, he looked around to see 
who he might share it with. Airmid, the tall, dark-
haired dreamer who held half of his mother's
heart, stood on a rock to their left but she was lost
in the world of the dream, her face still and her
eyes fixed on a horizon that only she could see.
Efnis, a dreamer of the Eceni, and Luain 
macCalma, the Elder dreamer who journeyed often to 
Hibernia and Gaul, were near her but both were
similarly preoccupied. Each was too distant and 
too intimidating to share a child's morning joy.

More promisingly, a few paces to the right was 
Cygfa,a his half-sister, who sat astride the neck of
the great chestnut horse that had once belonged to
an officer in the enemy cavalry and was now their
father's war mount. Caradoc himself was turned
away, speaking to a woman who stood on his
sword side, but his shield arm held his daughter to
his chest, loosely, because she was eight years old
and could manage the horse well enough on her
own, but distinctly, so that everyone could see that
Caradoc, war leader of three tribes, honoured his
daughter in the time before battle.

Cygfa wore a torc in woven gold around her
neck, a gift from a chieftain of the Durotriges who
was one of his parents' allies, but it was the stolen
legionary dagger in its enamelled silver scabbard
jangling at her hip that Cunomar coveted most.
Turning, she saw him and grinned. He scowled
back, dramatically. He had recently begun to
understand that his sister was more than twice his
age and would therefore become a warrior before
him, but he could not accept at all that she should
carry the spoils of victory when he could not.
Forgetting what good children did, he raised his
head and wriggled round to tug at the front of
his mother's cloak.

'Mama, when the enemy are all slain, can I have a--?'

Her fingers tightened on his shoulder and for a
joyful moment he thought she had heard him and
was about to promise that the sword of the enemy
general would be his when she returned. Then he
looked up into her face and followed the line of
her gaze down into the valley to the place where
the parting mist gave up a figure, and then
another, both coated in iron-grey woad-grease with lime stiffening their hair and painted in white
rings round their eyes. They carried something
heavy between them and left it at the bottom of
the hill. The smaller of the two ran forward alone.

Cunomar let go of his mother's cloak and
pointed. 'Ardacos,' he said distinctly. 'He has
killed the enemy.'

'We can pray so.'

Ardacos was one of his mother's closest friends.
Cunomar knew that she feared for the bear-man
and tried not to show it. Breaca spoke to the battle
mare and they walked a few steps down the slope.
The mare was old but she came alive when the 
woad spiked the air. She walked forward lightly, as 
if ready to run. At a rocky outcrop, screened by a 
straggle of rowan and hawthorn, they stopped.
Ardacos loped up the slope towards them.

'It is done.' Breathless, the little man gave the 
salute of the warrior first to Cunomar and then to
his mother. The lined skin of his face was 
smoothly stiff beneath the white clay paint but his 
eyes were fired with exultation and only a small
measure of pain. In answer to Breaca's unspoken
question, he said, 'There were eight of them, all
thick with wine and afraid of the night. Only one 
fought well. We lost Mab but the beacon is ours.'

'And the others? Do we have the whole chain?'

Cunomar heard a tension in his mother's voice
that made his stomach lurch and left his mouth
dry. 

Ardacos said, 'We do. The dreamers and the 
gods were good: the mist cleared for us when we 
needed it. We raised a torch and saw it returned
with a second to show that the chain is whole. We 
have every beacon from here to the coast. When 
the governor's ship leaves harbour, we will know 
of it. However good a general his successor might 
be, he will still sail in to find the country ablaze 
and his armies in flight and it is Roman work that
will have made it possible. We will turn every one
of their weapons against them, as we turn their
horses, their armour and their blades.' The little
man grinned, cracking the ring of paint around his 
mouth. 'To this end, I have a gift for the warrior-in-making.'

He meant Cunomar. The boy's heart surged.
Ardacos signalled behind him and the second
warrior ran up towards them. Even before she
reached the top of the slope, Cunomar could see
what she brought. He thought he might weep with
joy and wondered if that would be a good thing to
do on the eve of battle. Before he could decide,
Ardacos had knelt before his mother's grey mare
and held out a legionary sword in both hands.
Formally, using the cadences of a singer, or an
elder in council, he said, 'For Cunomar, son of
Breaca and Caradoc, cousin and namesake to
Cunomar of the fires, who gave his life that we
might live, I bring the weapon of the bravest of
this night's enemies.'

Stripped of its sheath, the blade lay naked
across Ardacos' palms, a thing of silver smeared
stickily black. Cunomar felt his mother's hands on
his waist and then he was swung down to the
ground and she was standing behind him, one
hand on his shoulder.

Before she could prompt him, the child drew
himself up and, following the conventions he had
heard in the summer councils, said, 'Cunomar, son
of the Boudica and of Caradoc, warrior of three
tribes, thanks Ardacos of the Caledones, warrior
of the she-bear and of the honour guard of Mona,
for his great gift and pledges . . .'

He ran out of words. He had no idea what he
pledged; the weapon held all his attention. It was
smaller than his mother's war sword and he was 
sure he could lift it. With both hands, he grasped 
the hilt and pulled. The blade slid off Ardacos'
open palms and fell, point down, to pierce the turf 
between the warrior's feet. Cunomar's pride fell
with it, turning to shame and fear of failure and 
the ill omen of a warrior-to-be who could not raise 
his own sword. Tears welled in him and spilled 
over and he took a breath to howl his 
disappointment.

'No. Look. There is no harm done. See, we can 
lift it together.' His mother's arms encircled him, 
stemming the grief. 'It's an enemy sword and Mab's blood is still on it. We must clean it and 
dedicate it to the gods and then we'll put it away 
and keep it safe until you're a warrior and can 
wield it in battle.'

That was not what he wanted. Cygfa had her 
knife, and could wear it openly; he wanted the same, or better. He felt his lower lip quiver and
the tears massed again on his lids. His mother
ruffled her fingers through his hair and went on as 
if she had never meant to stop. 'But before that, 
you can try one swing, to get the feel of it. See - 
I'll hold it, you can make the stroke.'

With one hand she lifted the blade, making it 
light as straw, and with the other she pressed his 
own small fist in before hers and he found that he 
could make the backhanded killing stroke in the 
way he had seen Cygfa do when their father first 
began to teach her, and then, because it was a 
Roman blade, he followed it with a lunge forward 
as the enemy were said to do, killing empty air that
had every Roman in the world at the end of it.

His mother laughed, breathlessly. 'That's good. See? The blade knows its rightful owner and--'
She stopped, and this time he did not have to look
up to see why because he had seen the thing before
her and it was his own small gasp that had
made her look with him to the horizon where a
beacon fire blossomed like a second sun. Cunomar
knew in the depths of his soul that it signalled the
beginning of the war to end all wars and that he
would not be old enough to wield his new blade
before the fighting ended.

The world changed, dizzyingly fast. Breaca
stood, suddenly, taking the Roman blade out of
reach and her son did not protest. He heard her
call out a name and a cry rose up around him, the
keening of the grey falcon that was the sign of
the Silures in whose land they lived and fought,
and of Gwyddhien who led the right wing of the
honour guard. The sound multiplied as her
warriors joined it and the mountain rang as with
a multitude of hunting birds. The child's world
darkened as men and women in uncountable
numbers mounted their horses and raised their
shields, blocking out the sun.

Cunomar turned, seeking his mother, and found
she was crouching beside him again, snapping her
fingers and whistling into the long shadows
beneath the hawthorn trees where the war hounds
lay awaiting battle.

Three hounds emerged. The grey-white bitch
was first, who had been called Cygfa until 
Cunomar's half-sister was born when the hound's 
name had been changed to Swan's Neck and then 
to just Neck. She was foremost among his 
mother's brood bitches and had given  birth to 
Stone, the tall young hound who came out next 
and who would run beside the grey battle mare and 
help the warriors to defeat the enemy. But it was
three-legged Hail for whom his mother waited, for 
whom she would always wait, sire to Stone and 
uncounted others. The great white-spotted war 
hound had once belonged to Breaca's brother Ban 
and, because of that, was now and for ever the 
most beloved of the Boudica's beasts.

The singers told more tales of Ban, lost brother 
to the Boudica, than of any other hero, living or 
dead. For one who had died before he ever sat his 
long-nights, the litany of Ban's achievements was 
dauntingly long. Hare-hunter, horse-dreamer and 
healer, he had been born with power such as had 
not been seen since the time of the ancestors. His 
first battle had shown him also to be a warrior; as 
a child not yet come to manhood, he had, they 
said, fought and killed at least twenty of the 
enemy before he was tricked into carelessness and
slain. The tragedy was made worse by the fact that 
it had been Amminios, brother to Caradoc, who
had betrayed the boy-hero and slain him. The 
singers played heavily on that; it would have been 
far less of a tale if the traitor had been an
unknown warrior from another land.

They sang of the hero's hound, Hail, in the same
tones and often in the same songs as they did of Ban, telling of the beast's outstanding courage in
battle and his prowess in the hunt. From when he
was too young fully to understand the words,
Cunomar had listened to his mother's voice
singing him to sleep, 'so that he dreamed through
the nights of a god-touched boy who killed
with the ease of a man and of his three-legged war
hound who belonged now to the Boudica and had
claimed for ever a large part of her soul.

Cunomar had tried to love Hail as his mother
did but had not succeeded. In the spring, when a
dog whelp had been born with the same white ear
and spattering of white spots on its coat as its sire,
Cunomar had hoped that perhaps his mother's
affections might shift so that the new hound
would displace the old, but it had not been so. The
whelp had been named Rain because there could
only ever be one Hail, and although Breaca had
cherished it and spent too much of her time in
training it, Hail was still the one who ran at her
side on the morning of battle and it, was Hail
before whom she crouched now, in whose pelt her
fingers dug deep so that her nose was level with
his nose and to whom she spoke as if the hound
were a warrior and could understand.

The hound grumbled deep in its throat and
when the Boudica let go, it sighed and turned to
make its stilted way to Cunomar's side. Hail was
too big, that was part of the trouble. The great
head loomed over the child's so that the boy had
to look up into its eyes. He thought it regarded
him with disdain, measuring him against those 
who had given their lives in battle and finding him 
not of their stature.

With an effort, Cunomar dragged his gaze 
away. Breaca had come to crouch before him as 
she had before the hound, with her face close to 
his, smiling. He reached out and hugged her, burying his face in the crook of her neck, breathing her 
in to the depths of his chest. He thought she 
should have smelled differently today, of battle 
and resolution, but she smelled as she always did, 
of sheep's wool and horse sweat and a little of 
hound spittle where Hail had licked her face and 
she had not wiped it away, and over all of 
those, she smelled of herself: his mother who 
would never change. 

Cunomar's hair was corn-gold like his father's. 
She smoothed it, tucking it behind his ears. Her 
lips pressed into his crown and he knew she was 
speaking but not what she said; the words were 
Eceni and too difficult for a boy raised on Mona 
amongst the dialects of the west. He ached for 
knowing she must go when he so badly wanted
her to stay and be his Boudica, to blaze with the 
wildfire just for him.

Instead she smiled the secret smile that she kept 
for her son and his father and said, 'My warrior-
to-be, I'm sorry, I have to leave you. The beacon
fire says the enemy governor has sailed away and
we must destroy his legions before another comes,
to take his place. I've asked Hail to take care of
you while I'm gone but really he's old and he needs
you to take care of him. Will you do that for me?'

He would do anything for her, she knew that.
Reaching up, he touched the silver  feather
That dangled in her hair. It was beautiful, each part
Of it perfect, so that Cunomar could imagine the
smith had taken the wing feather of a crow and
dipped it in silver, running gold in bands round the
quill to number the hundreds she had killed. He
wanted his mother to kill another thousand
Romans so that she could have more feathers but
the words were too complicated so instead he
smiled for her and said, 'I will guard Hail, I swear
it, my blood for his blood, my life for his,' as he
had heard the warriors do.

It was the right thing to say. She clasped his
head in both hands and kissed his forehead, then
rose swiftly, speaking again, in Eceni. A shadow
fell across the ground before him and Cunomar turned to find Dubornos at his side, the tall, gaunt
singer with sparse red hair who was one of his
mother's oldest allies.

Cunomar was not afraid of Dubornos, but he
did not understand him. In a world-where the
wearing of wealth was an open honouring of
the gods, the singer bore no gold or silver adornment,
but only a narrow band of fox pelt on his
upper arm to mark his dream. Moreover, he
carried about him a grief that drained him of
humour and he spoke rarely and always with great gravity as now, when he reached down and took
Cunomar's hand as if he were a small child
and said, 'Warrior-to-be, I have pledged to stay
and take care of the younger children. Will you  help me with that?'

Anyone could tell that he found it uncomfortable 
to speak so and would have preferred to take care 
of the children himself. Still, it was not done for a
warrior to turn down a request for help before 
battle. Cunomar withdrew his hand as politely as 
he could and touched the skinning knife at his 
belt. 'I will help,' he said, 'my life for theirs,' and 
he saw his mother clasp Dubornos' shoulder 
and heard her soft word of thanks and knew it 
was what she had wanted.

There were eight children, of whom Cunomar was 
the second youngest. With Dubornos' help, they 
scrambled up the mountain to take their place in a 
high eyrie, behind a rocky escarpment that gave 
them a view down to the river and across to the 
enemy fort that squatted on the opposite side of 
the valley.

Cygfa joined them presently, her face tear-streaked from her parting with their father. His 
sister may have been going to be a warrior sooner 
than he, but, in Cunomar's opinion, she did not 
know how to part properly with the warriors
before battle. She spoke briefly with Dubornos
and then the two of them came to lie with 
Cunomar, one on either side. They watched as the mass of horses threaded their way down the 
mountain and the warriors of the she-bear, who 
went into battle on foot wherever possible, ran 
down the slopes, grey as boulders with the 
woad-grease, and were swallowed by the mist.

For a while, stillness held the valley. Trumpets
sounded distantly from the fort. The Romans, too,
had seen the beacon but there was no knowing
what they made of it. Certainly they were not
likely to believe that the beacon hill had been
taken and their fort was under attack. The gods
or the dreamers, or both, kept the mist thick
around the river and sent layers of it rising on the
warm morning air, concealing the movements of
warriors. Looking carefully, Cunomar could see
the glint of a mail shirt or a spear tip, but the
harness and helmets of the warriors were well
wrapped to keep them quiet and unseen for the
longest possible time.

The boy's attention drifted. He was watching
Hail who was, in turn, watching a spider string a
web across the heather when Cygfa nudged his
elbow and hissed. He raised his eyes in time to see
his mother and father lead the charging warriors
up through the mist.

For the rest of his life, Cunomar remembered
that battle as if he had taken part in it, flying as
one of Briga's crows in the air'above his mother,
guarding her and marking the enemy for death.
He heard the drum of the hooves and the war cries
of the warriors and knew the point when they gave way to the screams of the wounded. He
smelled the blood and the horse sweat and
the curdling acid of spilled guts and the first
threads of smoke as the men and women of the
she-bear carried brush and burning brands up
the steep turf ramparts of the fort and set fire 
to the wooden palisade on top. He saw from up 
high the moment when the commander of the 
enemy forces chose to order his men out of 
the gates to fight in the open where the fires might 
not catch them and he knew, with a jubilation that 
lifted him cheering to his feet, that this was what 
his mother had planned and prayed for. He saw 
the brief hiatus in the fighting as' the warriors 
withdrew to let the bulk of the enemy sweep out 
of the gateway and then the crash as of a breaking 
wave as they surged back in again, annihilating 
the foe. Through it all, his mother and father 
killed at the fore, copper hair and corng-gold 
making two beacons for the warriors to follow. At 
no point did it occur to him that his mother might 
die, or be injured. She was the Boudica. She lived 
to kill the enemy and Cunomar, her son - her only 
child - would do the same when his time came.

III.

On the eastern side of the country, far from the
chaos of war, Julius Valerius, second in command
of the third troop, the Fifth Gaulish Cavalry,
stationed in perpetuity at Camulodunum, woke to
numbing cold. It gnawed into his dreams, which
were bad, and made them worse until he woke. He
pulled his cloak tighter and rolled over to lie on
his side. It was too dark to see. Stretching a hand
to the wall, he felt a slither of ice on the rough
plaster where the breath and sweat of four men
had frozen. His fingers were stiff. He blew on
them and tucked them under his armpit, swearing
aloud as the blood returned. The brand was the
only warm part of him; a raven's silhouette of fire
still burned in the centre of his chest a full month
after the iron had first seared his soul.

He pressed his thumb to the scar, tracing the
outline in the fragile, healing skin. The flesh
beneath was not hot but a perpetual flame burned 
in the cavity of his chest as a reminder of the 
night in the cellar. The god might not have visited 
him, but it was the god's mark that kept the 
bad dreams from becoming disabling nightmares,
or so he chose to believe. Lying in the dark, he 
would have liked to believe, as his fellow acolytes 
clearly did, that the brand gave him courage, that 
it made him one with Sol Invictus, that it joined 
him to an elite which those outside envied but 
did not fully comprehend. The last part of 
that might have been true - those who gave themselves to Mithras might possibly have become 
subject to the warped envy of those excluded 
from the god's grace - but he could not believe the 
rest.

On a good day, Valerius could persuade himself 
that he had never desired unity with the sun and 
his obvious failure to attain it in the god's 
ceremony was of no moment. This morning, with 
the new governor installed and the threat of an
eastern war increasing, he would dearly have liked
to feel a measure of blind, uncomplicated courage, 
or simply to feel warm.

He rose, stamping life into his feet and his feet 
into his boots. The water in the wash bowl was 
thickly iced. He broke it with rigid fingers and 
splashed the sleep from his eyes. He sharedthe 
room with three other junior officers of his troop:
Sabinius the standard-bearer, Umbricius the 
actuary and Gaudinius the armourer. All three 
turned and mumbled restlessly in their sleep, but 
did not wake. Valerius was the only one of the
four known for his early rising.

Beyond the doorway, the corridor lining the
barrack block was more still than usual and
lacked the customary draughts, as if, a full year
after its construction, someone had finally found
and blocked all the gaps in the brickwork. The
night-time lamps had burned out long since and
the space was darkly empty. Valerius stood a
while, feeling the stillness. Asleep, night was his
enemy; awake, it became his friend. It had taken
him a long time to acknowledge it, but recently he
had begun to realize how much he enjoyed the
anonymity of the dark.

In a while, brushing his fingertips along the
walls, he made his way to the outer door.
The night was not like other nights. The crunch of
his feet on the corridor's gravel was muffled, folding
in on itself and dying away too soon, and the
air smelled clean and sharp so that, when he
breathed in deeply, grains of ice formed in the
hairs of his nose, and when he let the breath out it
made white fog round his head.

Because it was dark and he was concentrating
on finding his way without stumbling and was not
keeping his mind in check, a twenty-year-old
memory rose from nowhere of a night just like
this, with a three-quarter moon hanging low over
winter oaks, of himself as a small child, wrapped
safe in the folds of his mother's winter cloak,
standing at the borderlands between the wild
wood and the horse paddocks, with exactly the
same feel of ice crystals forming and melting in his 
nose. Walking the length of a barracks corridor, he 
heard his mother's voice whisper in his ear, showing him the hare that lived on the moon's surface
and was the god's messenger to her people. He'd 
screwed up his eyes, staring hard until he saw the 
outline of the beast sitting side-on to the world.
When he found it, his mother's hands enfolded his 
and raised them, explaining how to make the 
salute the dreamers made to the moon so that he 
would always be able to ask help of that god when 
he was in need. In the world of the legionary 
barracks, his arm rose to shoulder height before it 
hit the wall.

It was an unforgivable lapse. Cursing aloud, 
Valerius spun backwards and jammed his 
shoulders hard against an upright oak beam.
Urgently, pressing the back of his head on solid 
wood and his thumb on his brand, he called the 
images of Mithras that had been shown him over 
these last two months: the youth in cap and cape 
emerging fully formed from solid rock, the corn of 
his fertility, the serpent and the hound that drank 
on the bull's spilled blood. In the stretches of time 
between heartbeats, Valerius built his god layer by 
layer in the air before him, manifesting by will-power alone the bull, most worthy of all 
opponents, to dance and struggle with its captor 
until the knife stabbed into its throat and a fountain of blood wept onto the earth.

The images worked, as they always did, slowly
and imperfectly. Sweating, Valerius spoke the 
prayers to Sol Invictus aloud in his mind until they
overwhelmed everything else. The power of the
god had kept his mother from his dreams since the branding and it banished her now from his waking
inattention, destroying every memory, down to the
soft husk of her voice in his ears.

Her voice lasted longest and he had to chant
openly not to let her words slide snake-like into
his head and heart. He had once believed his
mother dead, with his father and sister, and had
sworn allegiance to Rome on the strength of it.
Later, standing beside her newly slain body on the
invasion battlefield, he had watched her soul cross
to the otherworld and had tried to follow. His
mother had forbidden it, cursing him with continued
life. Before Mithras' intervention, her ghost
had returned to him nightly, standing in judgement
of his deeds, taunting him with the many
different pasts and futures that could have been his had he not chosen to fight for Rome: Valerius
the dreamer, Valerius the warrior, Valerius, friend
and lover of dreamers and warriors, nightwalker,
hound-caller, hare-dreamer, hero of battles. Most
often, she brought bright, vivid images of his
sister, who, alone of all his family, was still alive.
Word came daily of the resistance in the west and
her part in it.

If his mother, who was dead, despised him,
Valerius had no difficulty imagining the undiluted
loathing with which his sister would view the man
he had become. There were moments in the
darkest nights when Valerius wished her dead and
himself free of the consequences of her continued 
life and hated himself for wishing so. More than
anyone or anything else, it was to escape theliving
reality of the Boudica that Julius Valerius had first offered himself to the Infinite Sun.

Valerius continued to chant, not trusting silent 
prayer alone to keep the phantoms at bay. When 
he was calmer and could see only Mithras and the 
bull in the worlds beyond the one around him, he 
levered himself carefully away from the oak 
upright and continued to feel his way down the
corridor. At the far end he found the door and 
pushed it open.

Outside, there was snow. He had known there 
would be from the cold but the depth of it 
surprised him. It came to his knees, with a crisp 
skin on top that crackled under his weight.

If he had slept without dreams and woken free
of memories, the beauty of the night would have
left him silent with awe. The vast area of the 
fortress and the land around it had been brought 
together under a bear's pelt of unmarked snow so 
that Roman land and native land were one.
Above, the sky had emptied itself and the clouds
had gone, leaving the god's arc purest black. A 
million scattered stars reflected snow light so that,
even without the moon, he could see clearly the
outlines of the barracks stretching in all directions. 
On the eastern horizon a finger's breadth of not-black presaged the dawn. For an ordinary man in
ordinary times, it would have been a night to find
a hound and go hunting, to take a spear with a
good blade and seek out the wry-tusked yearling
boar that had evaded the best of the legions'
trackers all through the summer, a night to fire the
blood and pump the heart and remember what it
was to live.

Were Valerius younger and still in love, he might
have done exactly that, deaf to the responsibilities
of rank. Youth and passion had protected him
once from the realities of life, but he was no longer
in thrall to either of these things and his
promotion to duplicarius was a recent one, long sought and much cherished. Now he ignored both
the beauty and the potential for joy in the world
around him, and looked instead for the many and
varied chances of disaster.

He did not have to seek far. The pipes,leading to
the latrines had frozen; he found that almost
immediately. He used them anyway, knowing that
what he deposited would sit and stink until the
flow of water could be restored. He was not
the first; someone else had risen early and had the
same need. They, too, had come after the last fall
of snow. A pair of boots had left clear prints and
Valerius followed them for a while until the two
paths separated: the boots to go left, to the eastern
gate and the annexe beyond that housed the latest
wing of cavalry to arrive from Rome; Valerius to
go right, to the horse lines, where his duty lay.

The lights at the stables had not gone out
overnight; two men would have been flogged had
they done so. By their pooled light, he could see
that the mounts of his own command were quiet
and none of the stable roofs had collapsed under
the snow's added weight. That had been his
greatest fear and he was grateful not to find it
realized. He took a fistful of corn from the feed
room and walked down the line, doling it out
sparingly. At the end, separated by a gap from the
other mounts, stood an oddly marked pied horse,
all black with streaks of white running down from
poll, withers and croup as if the night sky had
been laid on its hide and then the gods
had splashed it with milk, or shards of ice.

This one horse did not lean out and lip at his
palm for the corn as all the others had done but
plunged forward, straining over the door to snatch
with bared teeth at the edge of Valerius' cloak. He
knocked its head away with the balled edge of his
fist and it came back faster a second time, head
snaking and ears laid flat with the whites showing
round its eyes and its teeth agape.

He was already sliding sideways between the
oncoming teeth and the door when a voice said,
'He is as evil as they say, then?'

Valerius had believed himself entirely alone. The
shock of finding it otherwise stopped him just long
enough for the horse's bared teeth to meet the
flesh of his shoulder, stunningly. He fell as if struck
by a lump hammer.

It would have been hard to say who was the
more shocked. The horse jerked back, flinging its
head high. It spun in the box, crashing against the
walls so that the whole line became restless.
The stranger was calmer but more aware of his
fault.

'I'm sorry. I should have waited before I spoke.
They told me his name is Crow, which means
death, and I thought it a wine-fuelled jest. Clearly
I was mistaken. Are you hurt?'

'No. I always fall at my mount's feet first thing
in the morning. My physician recommends it.
Thank you.'

Valerius took the offered hand and pulled himself
upright. His shoulder boiled as if filled with
liquid lead. Many years ago, he had taken a sword
wound in exactly that place and the flesh bruised
more easily than elsewhere. He rolled his arm a
little, feeling if the bones had broken-and, hearing
no grating, nor feeling any, chose for the moment
to ignore it and deal with the more pressing
matters of the foreigner - he must be a foreigner;
not a single member of the garrison would have
been so carelessly familiar - and the pied horse.

In the world of Valerius' priorities, horses
always came before men. He lifted the catch on
the door and slid inside. The Crow, whose name
did indeed mean death, turned to kick as he
entered the box, which was a good sign that the
horse was not as shocked as it had looked. Sliding
past, Valerius grabbed for a hank of mane near the
top of its neck, then crooked his arm under its
throat and across the bridge of its nose as a makeshift halter. Between them, it was a signal that the man had won and the beast could accept
his gift of corn with its pride intact. It did so and
he walked it to the door, easing out before it could
strike again.

'Thank you. I believe he-' He was speaking to
empty air, and so stopped. The foreigner was 
further down the line, leaning over a box door 
talking to the chestnut mare inside. He was a man 
of Valerius' own age, old enough to have been a 
warrior amongst his own people and then to have 
trained with the cavalry and risen up from the 
rank of trooper, but not so old that he had seen 
many battles. He was half a head shorter than 
Valerius, which still left him taller than most 
Romans. In the light of the stable lamps, his hair 
took on the russet brown of a stag at the rut and 
it hung thickly to his shoulders without the plaiting or adornment that would have been usual in a 
Gaul. He wore horseman's boots, not caligae, 
which meant he was cavalry, not infantry, and the 
trail of prints from one stable to the other matched 
exactly the trail Valerius had tracked from the 
latrines. Valerius set himself a small and silent 
wager as to the man's rank and nationality.

Seeing him coming, the foreigner turned from 
his preoccupation with the chestnut mare in the 
box. Without saluting, he asked, 'Is your shoulder 
damaged?'

No-one ranked lower than duplicarius would
have spoken with such easy familiarity, anyone 
higher would have demanded some kind of 
acknowledgement. The foreigner's rank, then, was
equivalent to the master of horse; first part of the 
wager won.

Valerius said, 'No. At least, not badly. The
Crow has spent the past eight years trying to bite
me and that was the first time he's ever succeeded. I
was afraid he might feel he had reached the zenith of
his life and should lie down and give himself to the
god. He seems well, however, for which I am duly
grateful. Without a horse to fight, what would a
man do in the long days of the governor's peace?'

It was a test, of sorts, and was recognized as
such. The foreigner's mouth twitched in the beginnings
of a smile. 'Polish his armour, perhaps? And
await the call to war?' The answer was a safe one,
saying all that was needed. Neither was about to
compromise himself before the other in a way that
could be considered treasonous, but each hated
equally the tedium and inactivity of life in the
fortress.

Valerius walked on to the next stable block in
which the horses of the second troop were housed.
They were not strictly his responsibility, but he did
not fully trust the one who should have cared for
them, the one who was clearly still asleep,
unaware that it had snowed through the night. He
reached the first box and gave the last of his corn
to a roan gelding who liked him.

He was halfway down the line when the foreign
horsemaster caught him up. The second half of the
wager remained outstanding. It was part of
Valerius' pact with himself that he could not ask
any question outright. He said, 'You are with the
cavalry unit that came over with the new governor
- yes? The one camped in the annexe alongside the
bath house. Are your horses settling in after the 
sea crossing and the ride here?'

The foreigner shrugged, loosely. 'They're settled
and resting although they weary of the cold, as I 
do. In Thrace, it snows, but the air is not so wet 
and the cold does not eat so at one's bones. And 
we were told it would not snow here for a month.'

In Thrace? Hah. Thracian! It had been an unsettling night but the day was proving better.
Valerius had won a brief skirmish against the 
Crow, or at least had not lost; had unequivocally
won the wager he had set himself, and the god had
kept his horses from ruin in the snow. Feeling 
better than he had since waking, Valerius said, 
'It doesn't usually snow this early. This is 
unfortunate.'

'Or perhaps fortunate? The gods have sent it as
a gift to the new governor. The natives will be as
cold as we and will not press their rebellion.' 

They were walking together, with an ease of old
comrades. Without thinking, Valerius said, 'If it is a
gift then it has been requested of their gods by
the tribal dreamers and granted by them as evidence
of good will. Have you ever been in a native
roundhouse?'

'Not such as you have here.'

'No, well, you will have to believe me when I
say that we may have brought them civilization in
the form of freezing barracks with four men to an
unheated room, but the natives will have slept the
night in a roundhouse the height of ten men, with
forty families within, and a fire that was banked
high and gave heat all night. They will have slept
with their hounds at their backs and their lovers
close and they will not have needed to wrap up in
their cloaks, or even to wear a second tunic, to
have slept well and woken rested. They will have
risen this morning to warmth and food and the
companionship of their families and, if they
choose not to read the signs sent by their gods the
night before, they won't know it has snowed
except by the smell of the air and only then as they
lift the door-flap. I wouldn't say this is a gift from
Roman gods and it will certainly not quench the
fires of rebellion.'

He stopped, biting his tongue. The Thracian
stared at him thoughtfully. Another man might
have asked how a junior officer in the Gaulish
auxiliary had come to be so familiar with the
interior of a native roundhouse in winter, or at
least would have asked the questions that confirmed
the rumours or denied them. This man
rubbed the side of his nose a moment and said
only, 'I have heard that you lived for a while
amongst the Eceni. Is it true that their women lead
the warriors into battle?'

The charge from the west was led by a woman.
The name they are calling is Boudica, she who
brings victory. The voice was Valerius' own,
younger and still mercifully unaware.

His mother, coming later, knew everything and
judged him for it. Her mark is the serpent-spear,
painted in living blood on Mona's grey. Once, it
was red on Eceni blue. Yours could have matched
it, the horse or the hare painted on blue. You could
have been dreamer to her warrior. With you atat her 
side, she would have been ...
'No.'

For the second time that morning, Valerius
turned his back on the foreigner and walked away.
In front of him, the principia dwarfed the buildings around it. Only the governor's house came
close in grandeur to the great quadrangle of the 
legion's assembly hall and at that moment Valerius
was not concerned with the governor's peace and 
comfort. He had the responsibilities of his rank. In
honouring them was his best, possibly his only,
defence.

Speaking over his shoulder, he said, 'We should
finish our inspection of the stables and then check
the principia. Did the tavern rumour-mongers tell 
you also that the roof caved in last winter under 
the weight of the snow and was not rebuilt until 
after midsummer? Our recently departed
governor, may the god grant him long life, wished 
to display to the natives the full splendour of
Rome. There are tiles under that snow so bright 
they would make your eyes water if you had to
stare at them under a full sun.'

The Thracian laughed, a little late, as if his mind
were elsewhere. 'And the beams are made of straw
that they do not take the weight?'

'No. The beams are made of green oak which is
what you get if you build a fortress in a newly
conquered territory and have to use whatever
materials are to hand. The first architect built on
Roman lines, believing that the beams must be
slender to look good. The second learned from his
predecessor's mistakes. The new ones are twice the
size of the old but this snow is twice as thick. It
should be swept from the roof without delay. I can
see to that, or find someone who can. If your
horses and your men are well and you can spare
the time, it might be good if you sought out the
water engineer. The baths are the child of his heart
and if he finds the pipes are malfunctioning he
may, like the horse, decide it is time to lie down
and give himself up to the god. His name is Lucius
Bassianus, an Iberian - you will have heard of
him?'

The foreigner was leaning against the wall of
the last stable in line, with his thumb in his belt,
and he was studying Valerius as a man might
study a newly bought colt. He was manifestly unconcerned
by the fate of the principia or the
latrines. 'I'm sorry,' he said, shaking his head. 'I
haven't, but then I have been here less than two
days and those who tell tales are concerned with
bigger minds than a water engineer and the sewers
he builds. The most talkative, or perhaps the most
vengeful, speak of a newly made duplicarius of the
Fifth Gallorum with a pied horse that is evil incarnate
and of his once-friend, the prefect Corvus,
who was a captive of the natives in his youth.'

The tilt of his head left the way for a question
and its ready answer. Any normal man would
want to know what others said of him when his
back was turned. In return, such a man would
offer more information than the rumour-mongers
could provide.

Valerius had a good idea what was said of him 
and had no desire to hear the embellishments 
spewed from late-night wine. He said, 'Did they
tell you that we have a governor who rode into his
province expecting the rich pickings of conquest
and found himself instead in the midst of an unfinished war that could take him ten years and as
many legions to win?'

The Thracian conceded defeat with a good
grace. 'No,' he said. 'For the hard truth, I come to
my elders and betters. In the minds of those I drink
with, talk of war is a waste of breath when we 
could be talking of love and loss and the passions
that arouse us. The word of the governor was all
of his son who is senior tribune with the Second
legion, stationed in the far south-west. The lad,
they say, had barely settled into his new lodgings
when he was sent back to attend the governor's
war council with word that the legion is beset by
natives and the legate dare not leave his post.'

'Which, of course, has much to do with love and
loss and the passions of arousal.'

The Thracian grinned. 'It might do. I am told
that the governor's son is tall and very beautiful
with jet black hair and eyes like a doe and the
legate has really sent him east to keep him safe
from the centurions of the Second who have been
in post too long and are tiring of the other ranks.'
He evaluated the effect of this and then, only a
little more gravely, said, 'But of course those of us
of more senior rank know that he will have been
sent because he can be relied upon to impress on
his father the severity of the threat posed by the
hostile tribes that besiege his legion.'

'And those of us of more senior rank can
imagine that if the young man succeeds, we might
well find ourselves riding west to support that
legion in battle.'

'Would we mind that?'

Valerius said, 'The Gauls would be delighted.
They are ready for action. I don't know about the
Thracians. Can you ride your horses in knee-deep
snow?'

The Thracian blinked slowly. With a childlike
gravity, he said, 'Of course, but we would not
choose to do so unless forced. In Thrace, a man's
horse is his brother. We would never make him
lame to prove a point.'

Valerius laughed. It was a long time since he had
been bested in conversation and longer still since
he had laughed aloud and meant it. Better than
anything else, it cleared the last vestiges of the
dreams from the night. He said, 'If you drink in
the sewer taverns long enough, you'll find that the
men of the Quinta Gallorum prefer to ride mares
rather than geldings because a mare can pass urine
at a full gallop without needing to slow or to stop,
and that to a Gaul a man's mount is far closer than
his brother.'

The smile that met Valerius' was brilliant. 'But
you're not a Gaul?'

'I am not.'

They walked on in peaceful silence to the
junction with the via principalis. The snow was
thicker here. Drifts piled deeply against the side of
the nearest tribune's house, made citrus by the
light of a late-tended lamp. The frozen crust was
thicker here, too. Almost, they could walk on it
without sinking through.

The Thracian said, 'I will find the engineer
Bassianus and tell him that the pipes leading to the
latrines are frozen and also some of those feeding
the bath house. I looked in before I came up here
and at least half are not flowing as they were last
night. In the course of my search, is there anywhere
I might come across real, cooked food?'

He asked his question casually, which must have
taken some effort. Every fortress had somewhere
among its guard posts a reliable source of decent,
safe, hot food that could be begged or bought on
a cold night. For a trooper or a legionary newly
arrived, the knowledge of who cooked it and
where was one of those many small details that
transformed fortress life from the barely endurable
to something more pleasant. The secret was not
always freely given, however, or even readily
bought.

At another time, or with another man, Valerius
might well have feigned ignorance, or simply
refused to answer. Instead, pointing to his right, he
said, 'Try the south tower of the east gate. They
keep alight a brazier and I have never known them
not have meat. At worst, on poor days, it isn't
spiced.'

Grinning, the Thracian clapped him on the arm.
'But today will not be a poor day. Will you join me?'

With all that had just passed, Valerius might
have considered it, but he had seen a lamp lit in
the doorway of a house further down the via
principalis and had a need to find what it meant.
'With regret, no,' he said. 'There is still the matter
of the snow on the roof of the principia. I should
report now, while there is still time to act.'

'Then I will go alone.' The Thracian saluted. 'It
has been a pleasure to know you.'

'And you.' They had parted and taken ten paces
before Valerius turned back. 'You didn't tell me
your name.'

'Sdapeze, 'Longinus Sdapeze, armourer and
horsemaster of the Ala Prima Thracum.' The
man's smile was open and friendly. He had pale
eyes, almost yellow, like a hawk's. 'We will ride
out together one day soon when the snow will not
make the horses lame and you will see that a
Thracian mount can match any colt bred in Gaul,
however bad its temper.'

The man was lost in the gloom before Valerius
turned his mind to what had been said and found
that this last, which had sounded like a request,
had in fact been a challenge and an offer, and that,
nodding, he had accepted both.

IV.

If he had been faithful to the requirements of rank
order, Valerius would' have reported the facts of
the snow and the frozen latrines to his immediate
superior, the decurion Regulus. If, instead, he had
followed the imperatives of his god, he would
have sought out the centurion of the third cohort
of the XXth legion who was his new Father under
the Sun, replacing Marullus, who had gone to
join the Praetorian Guard in Rome. He did neither
of these, but followed the light of a single lamp
south down the main arterial road of the fortress.
As he walked, he tracked a single set of footprints
in the snow, passing in the same direction.

Quintus Valerius Corvus, prefect of the Ala
Quinta Gallorum, occupied one of the smaller
tribunical houses located near the southern end
of the via principalis, on the opposite side to
the great covered quadrangle of the principia. The
prefect had given Valerius the name he now bore
and, for five good years, a reason to live. There had
been a time, before the building of the tribunes'
quarters was complete, when it had seemed likely
that Valerius would have been granted his own
room within Corvus' lodgings. Indeed, in the chaos
of building, when men throughout the fortress lived
in half-finished accommodation, sleeping amongst
piles of bricks with wet plaster on the walls and the
smell of whitewash in the air, they had known which
room it would be even if Valerius had not yet slept
there.

Then, the embers of passion had still warmed
Valerius' heart and the impossible pressures of his
life had not begun to take their full toll. He had
been of junior rank, and liked by his peers. The
unstable patronage of the Emperor Caligula and
his own passionate relationship with Corvus,
which could so easily have soured his standing
with the other men, had instead elevated him to
the rank of mascot within the troop. He had found
honour fighting the hostile Germanic tribes on the
Rhine and, in his twisted half-mastery of the
Crow-horse, he had proved himself a horseman
worthy of the rank Corvus had bestowed on him.

To the cavalry, horsemanship and fighting
prowess were intimately entwined, and in a wing
drawn almost exclusively from the ranks of
conquered Gauls Valerius had been one of the very
few to have seen real combat before he had
enrolled. His peers invented stories of the darkhaired
tribal boy who had ridden his mad horse to
freedom and then, eschewing all offers to return to
his homeland, had joined the legions to fight for
Rome. Rumours grew around him and Corvus, further tangling their joint past until it was said
that the Roman prefect had been captured by
barbarian tribes as he spied for the emperor in
Britannia and that Valerius had conspired to free
him, waiting on the shore until Corvus could sail
back alone to find him. The wilder tales said that
together they had fought the dreamers to wrest
Valerius back to civilization, calling down the
power of Roman gods to best those of the natives.
No-one thought to ask why a boy raised in
the freedom of the native tribes should prefer the
discipline of the Rhine legions, beset by river-mist
and the constant threat of hostile attack, nor, later,
fighting the dreamers and the fog they called down
on a battlefield, did anybody question the ability
of one man to fight against them and win.

The truth was both less and more unlikely and
it waited for Valerius in the waking dreams of his
nights, when fear of his mother kept sleep at bay.
Then, he lay in the dormitory listening to the
sleeping breath of men he did not love and it was
hard not to compare the cold and isolated damp
with the comfort of a crowded roundhouse and
the close, uncomplicated warmth of a hound,
or the unexpected joy of intimacy with Corvus,
which had opened the world and made life
possible again.

The paths to the past, once travelled, were not
easy to avoid. Valerius had found by experience
that half a night could be lost staring into darkness
trying to decide if the gossip was half right and the
spark with Corvus had truly been there in the six
months when the young Roman officer had,
indeed, been a captive of the tribes and a boy with
a passing knowledge of Gaulish had become his
confidant and friend. It was too long ago ever to
be sure and the memories, when they came, had an
otherworldly sense to them, as if they were tales of
another man's life, told so often as to gain a
credence of their own. Only some things came
back in full and those most often in daylight,
cripplingly: the sudden knifing images of love and
its aftermath; the flash of a blue cloak and the
smile above it; the sheer exhilarating power of a
red Thessalian mare, racing a man on a dun colt;
the flash of sun-struck bronze as a line of
Trinovantian horsemen raised their shields and the
Eceni, schooled by a Roman, came against them.
All these could sweep through without warning,
leaving Valerius ragged, irritable and looking for
someone or something to shout at. 

With adequate sleep and no dreams, he could
manage the worst excesses of his anger, but the
constant presence of his mother and the judgements
she brought had eroded his equanimity. The
first few months after the invasion had been
chaotic and everyone had lived on short tempers
and little sleep. The warmer, longer days of spring
had restored most men's humour; it was only
Valerius who continued to vent his rage at whoever
was within reach. The men came to like him
less and fear him more, and, although this was
almost certainly what had earned him the
promotion, it had not restored peace to his soul.

It was Corvus, ultimately, who bore the worst
and deserved it least and it had been at Valerius'
own request that his room in Corvus' house had
been given over to other use and he had been billeted
instead with the other junior officers of his troop.
He had believed at the time that it was a temporary
necessity and that he was acting to protect both himself and a man for whom, at the very least, he still
had utmost respect from his own unpredictable,
unforgivable, uncontrollable and ever-increasing
lapses in temper. Even now, two years later, he
continued to believe he might one day go back.

He had visited only twice after the house had been
built, both times in the first month after his change
of billet. On each occasion, a lamp lit in the doorway had been a signal that Corvus was alone and
would welcome company. It seemed likely it did so
still. It was possible that the lamp had been lit
tonight for Valerius and that, if he chose to, he
could enter unannounced and follow the familiar
line of sheltered candles to the private apartments.
He did not so choose.

Corvus' household was always first to wake and
deal with the events of the night. The snow had
been shovelled away from the doorways and a
broad corridor dug out into the via principalis, easing the route for the passers-by. It was a helpful
gesture that also effectively removed the
possibility that anyone could follow the trail of a
single set of boot prints from the several that
passed down 	the roadway to this particular
entrance.

Frozen gravel crunched underfoot as Valerius
walked to the door. A bronze bowl stood to one
side, a small mallet above it. He struck the
one softly with the other and waited as the sound
embrazened the night. Everything around him was
white. Even the walls of this place were washed
with simple lime, leaving it pure, like the snow,
clearly set apart from the tiled and painted glory
of the legionary tribunes' houses set on either side.

The gong was answered, as Valerius had known
it would be, by Mazoias, the Babylonian. The
head of Corvus' household was a white-haired old
man with a crooked shoulder. In his cups, Mazoias
claimed kinship with princes of Babylon and the
royal house of Persia. Sober, he was a slave whom
Corvus had bought at a market in Iberia and subsequently
freed, who chose to continue in place
because a life spent in service to Corvus was better
than any other he could envisage. The old man
recognized Valerius. His gnarled features froze
midway through their message of welcome and
the door, which had been opening, began to close.

Valerius put his foot in the jamb. 'I think not. I
have a message for the prefect. Tell him the snow
is an arm's length thick on the roof of the principia
and it will take more men than I can order to clear
it. If he wishes the governor to make his first
public address to his legions in safety and warmth,
he will order out at least one full troop of men.
Tell him also that the pipes to the main latrin are 
frozen. I have sent a man to find Bassianus but the 
prefect may wish--'

Each man has his own scent. It may lessen a
little when he is warm and oiled from the baths, or 
running freely with other men's blood in battle,
but it never departs entirely. After a night wrapped
in sheepskin against the cold, it is as strong as it 
will ever become, unless that night has been spent
in company, in which case it is stronger. Corvus,
Valerius thought, had spent this night alone, but 
perhaps not that part since waking. No amount of 
work or responsibility or prayer to the god could 
protect him completely from the impact of that.
He drew his foot from the door jamb, fixed his 
gaze on the wall opposite and saluted.

Corvus said, 'Thank you, Mazoias. I will speak 
with the officer.'

There was a brief clash of wills, the outcome of 
which was never in doubt. With a glance that promised eternal damnation if his master was left 
out of sorts, the old man withdrew.

They were alone. Neither spoke. Snow sucked 
at the silence, softening it. The lamp nearest the 
doorway was of clay with a Capricorn painted in 
rough glaze on the bowl. It had never burned 
cleanly and did not do so now. Out of habit,
and for something to do, Corvus reached up and 
altered the lie of the wick. A spiral of smoke rose 
to stain the ceiling and the light glowed more 
strongly after, so that more of each of them could 
be seen. Corvus had not been awake long; his
brown hair was still damp from a hurried morning
wash and not adequately combed. In truth, it was
never adequately combed. The back was cut
properly short but the flick of life at the front
swooped in an unruly curve across his forehead
and mirrored the arc of his brows. It said all one
needed to know of the man and his attitude to
authority. The scars and the weather-browned
skin told the same tale. Only his eyes could tell
more, did he choose, but they were hidden in
shadow. His words fell out of the same shaded
space.

'What do I call you now?' Their last argument,
the most damaging, had been over Corvus' use
of the old name, now abandoned. They had never
resolved it.

Valerius said, 'I am Julius Valerius in the
records, as you know. My men call me duplicarius,
or master of horse. Both are acceptable.' 

'Good. I'll try to remember. How is he?' 
'Who?'
'Your man-killing horse. The one of whom you
are master.'

There was a thread of humour in the voice.
Caught off guard, Valerius replied in kind. 'He's
well. You'd be proud of him. He managed to bite
me this morning. The shock nearly killed us both.

Distantly, he was aware that his shoulder ached
but the pain was not yet fully part of him. Like the
brand, he yearned for it to come home, as if pain
were something real in which he could hide.
Experimentally, he rolled his arm back  and 
winced.

He had forgotten in whose company he stood.
Corvus had reached a hand for his cloak and 
turned the neck of it back before either of them 
remembered that he no longer had leave  - and then
remembered also that he was a prefect 
and could do anything he chose with the cloak and 
person of a junior officer. Valerius swayed back at 
his touch and came upright again, parade-ground 
stiff.

Corvus hissed through his teeth and snatched 
his hand away. 'I'm sorry.'

'No harm.' Valerius believed it. The cloak may 
have been turned back but the fit of his tunic 
covered his shoulder. He did not find until later 
that the spreading bruise had crept up his neck,
turning the flesh blue-black from shoulder to ear 
and from collar bone to scapula, and that a great 
butterfly's wing of it showed clearly in the light 
from the lamp. Longinus Sdapeze must have seen 
it, too, but had the sense not to comment.

Corvus stared ahead, saying nothing. Rarely 
were they so formal in each other's company, It 
damaged them both and destroyed what they had 
been.

Pulling his cloak straight, Valerius said, 'I'm 
sorry, I was distracted. One of the Thracian
cavalrymen came with news that the pipes to the 
bath house are frozen. Longinus Sdapeze. He's
astute. He thinks of problems before they occur.'
Men like that were few enough. On the Rhine,
Valerius and Corvus had vied with each other to
find them, to single them out and train with them,
to set them apart from the greater mass of
unthinking brutality that was the legion and its
auxiliaries. They had not concerned themselves
with the other ways by which men set themselves
apart.

As if following the thought, Corvus said, 'I
heard you are given to the bull-slayer, that you
have taken the raven.'

It was not a secret. Everybody knew the names
of the initiates. The secrecy lay in the nature of the
tests and the oaths required of the acolytes; in this
was the god's ultimate strength. Only with Corvus
did the fact of one man's vows mean so much
more.

Stiffly, Valerius said, 'I believed it would be constructive
in the development of my career.'

Corvus raised one brow. 'I'm sure it will be.'

They waited. A thin northern wind coursed
down the via principalis. Shouted orders rode on
the back of it. Enough men had woken for others
to realize the danger posed by the snow. The part
of Valerius that genuinely was concerned with the
future of his career saw the urgency of his message
diminish, and with it the credit for raising the
alarm.

Corvus ran his tongue round his teeth. After a
moment, he stepped back, holding the door open.
'Would you come in? I have sent word to the
decurions to have the fifth and sixth troops clear
the roof of the main buildings of the principia. The
fourth will see to the praetoria, although it is 
furnished with hypocausts and I suspect the 
governor's household will have burned the fires 
throughout the last several nights to banish the 
cold. It would not surprise me to see the tiles  shine
free of snow and steaming when the sun rises.'

'Rank will have its privilege,' said Valerius dirly.

'Indeed. Which is why I think you should meet 
the governor's son. He is inside and I have left him 
alone too long. We were discussing the uprising in 
the west. Will you join us?'

V.

Corvus' morning visitor waited, as was proper, in
the prefect's office. It was a spare, sparse room to be dignified with such a title. The walls were
whitewashed and without adornment. The plaster
was finer than in the barracks and the place lacked
the clutter of the legionary lodgings, but otherwise
there was little to choose between this room and the one in which Valerius had awakened before
dawn. This one was bigger, that was all, and there were lamps at every available point in case the
prefect should require to read something while standing in the farthest corner. In addition to those, it was favoured with the added advantage
of a table and two chairs, one of them occupied by
a man who stood as the door opened.

'Corvus? Who was- Ah, we have a visitor. An
auxiliary. Can I guess who this is?'

'Probably, but I'll introduce you anyway.
Valerius, come in. Don't stand in the doorway,
you'll let in the cold.'

And so he had to enter, into the presence of the 
smiling youth with the perfectly black hair and 
the eyes of a doe who almost certainly did know 
exactly who Valerius was and what he had been 
and did not find his presence uncomfortable.
Indeed, it seemed likely that this particular youth 
had never had reason to feel uncomfortable at any 
time since the day of his smooth, sedate birth into 
the splendour and riches of Rome.

Longinus Sdapeze, a Thracian tribesman, with 
only a passing veneer of civilization, had remarked 
on the beauty of the governor's son. The Thracian 
had not remarked on the sheen of good breeding 
the young man carried and the quiet assurance 
that went with exceptional wealth and the 
certainty of a senatorial future. He had not 
mentioned, either, that the lad was twenty and 
that the vigour of youth shone from him as if from 
a newly backed racehorse so that, even if one 
loathed him on instinct, it was impossible to look 
elsewhere.

In a fortress full of hardened legionaries, 
Valerius was not used to feeling old, or, given his 
own height, to feeling small. In the presence of the 
governor's son, he felt both, and for that alone he 
would have left if propriety and his pride had 
allowed it. Neither did, and so he stood just inside 
the door and was formally introduced.

'Tribune, this is Julius Valerius, duplicarius of 
the third troop under my command - the officer 
of whom we were speaking earlier. Valerius, this is Marcus Ostorius Scapula, tribune in the Second
legion. His legate has sent him here with news of
the worsening situation in the west.'

... of whom we were speaking earlier. The hair
prickled on Valerius' neck. The voice of quiet
irony that filled his mind in times of personal crisis
noted that at least part of Longinus Sdapeze's
rumour was true; the tribune had been sent to appeal to his father for aid. That did not make the
rest of it false. They say the legate has really sent
him to keep him safe from the centurions who
have been in post too long and are tiring of the
other ranks. One could wonder if the governor
would consider a prefect a better match than a
centurion for his son.

Mazoias had reappeared, bringing a third chair
and well-watered wine. He fussed around the
corners lighting more lamps, as if the room had a
sudden need to be brighter. The governor's son
was happy to stand under the glare of more lights; he was used to being stared at. Crossing his arms
on his chest, he said, 'We were discussing the most
recent Siluran uprising and the likely impact on
the client tribes around the fortress. The prefect
tells me you may have a useful insight into their
likely response should the governor choose to
have them forcibly disarmed.' 

What?

One does not gape at a governor's son even if
his father has just proposed an act of monstrous
insanity before which a junior officer's personal
concerns are rendered so trivial as to be 
meaningless. 

Valerius found a wall behind him and leaned
against it. With great care, he said, 'The governor
is very new to the province - he has been here less
than one full day. He arrives at a time of great disquiet and it is certain that the Silures and their 
allies have timed their uprising to coincide with his 
predecessor's departure so that--'

'We know that. The war chief Caradoc plans his 
strategies as if Caesar himself were advising him.
What we do not know is what the eastern tribes
will do if we confiscate their weapons. I understand that you have some experience of life
amongst the natives and may therefore be in a 
unique position to tell us.'

Too many betrayals crowded Valerius' brain.
From the far side of the room, Corvus said,
'Tribune, that's unfair. Valerius is a duplicarius
and only newly that. Were he a full decurion, he 
would not feel able to answer honestly now that
you have told him the plan is the governor's. Even I
would only say this in private, but you have to 
believe me that the tribes will fight for their weapons 
as hard as any Roman would, possibly more so.
Valerius would tell you the same if he had leave.'

'Then I give him leave. Duplicarius, I put you on 
notice that the discussion taking place in this room 
is private and I caution you not to repeat any part 
of it beyond these walls or in other company. Do I
have your oath that this is so?'

Valerius nodded. 'You do.' What else could he 
say? He had seen men at swordpoint given more
freedom to move. 

'Good, then I am similarly bound. I may give my father my advice based on your information
and that of the prefect, but I will not reveal its
source. Therefore you are free to answer as you
believe. In fact, I command you to do so. What
will the tribes do if we require them to give up
their weapons?'

A man's career could fall on such as this. When
it is all that he has left, such a thing matters a great deal. Valerius took a steadying breath. Letting it
out, he said, 'If you disarm them, without question
they will rebel.' 

'Why?'

Images jostled for space in the crowded morass
of his mind, none of them Roman, none of them
suitable for a governor's son. Selecting the few he
could readily present to tutored Latin sensibilities,
Valerius said, 'To the tribes, a warrior's blade is a
living thing, as precious as a hound or a welltrained
battle mount, not simply because of its
worth as a weapon but because it carries the
dream of the one who wields it, the essence of
the true self that only the gods know. In the sword
resides the quality of the warrior's courage, the
honour, the pride, the humanity, the generosity of
spirit - or lack of it. If it is a blade of the ancestors,
passed down from father to daughter, from mother
to son, then it carries also the ancestors--'

'Stop. "From father to daughter, from mother to
son" ?'

They were not doe-eyes. The governor's son was
a pitiless black-eyed falcon and his eyes promised
swift death to all who scuttled under their gaze.
Quietly he said, 'A centurion of the Second legion
has been demoted to the ranks and twelve of his 
men flogged for stating in reports and under 
questioning that a woman led the greater mass of 
the Siluran warriors in their attack on the western-most fort and that other women fought at her side.
I questioned the men myself and they would not
change their accounts. The governor believes this
to be the fantasy of defeated minds. Was he right?'
Longinus had asked much the same question
but he could safely be ignored where a governor's
son could not. Her mark is the serpent-spear,
painted in living blood ... Yours could have
matched it, the horse or the hare ...

Valerius would not - could not - look at 
Corvus. A name burned the air between them and
was not to be spoken under any circumstances. In
a voice that strained for normality and fell so very
short, he said, 'The governor is always right.'
He heard the silence crack.

'So he was wrong.'

Marcus Ostorius Scapula paced the length of 
the room. With his face to the far wall and his 
hands locked behind him, he said, 'You were 
explaining why the eastern tribes will rebel if disarmed. If I understand you aright, they value their 
weapons as amongst their most prized possessions
and if we were to confiscate these blades - if we 
were, say, to have a smith break them on an anvil
in full sight of their people - we would cause them
great pain as well as diminishing their capacity to
rebel. Am I correct?'

'You would as well crucify their children.'

'It may come to that.'

The young man turned. He was not, after all,
entirely without pity, one could read it on his face,
but he was the son of the man who had taken
command of a province expecting at least a
winter's peace and had first to achieve it. Sitting,
Marcus Ostorius leaned forward, placed his
elbows on his knees and made of his fingers a
steep-sided tent that tapped a slow rhythm on his
lips.

'You will know that there has been insurrection
in the lands north of here in the last half month.
Two forts have been destroyed by the Eceni and a
unit of the Twentieth was forced to seek refuge
here in the fortress. The governor has two choices.
He can order the decimation of the two cohorts
that fled in the face of the enemy as punishment
for their cowardice, or he can subjugate the tribes
as punishment for the uprising and as a means to
prevent its repeat. Which of these would you
advise him to choose?'

Valerius did gape then. Even Corvus shifted in
his chair. With exaggerated deference the prefect
said, 'Decimation, tribune? Is the governor truly
considering this?' Scapula's reputation, ferocious
as it was, had not extended that far.

Scapula's only son smiled tightly. 'He is. It may
be he needs to do both, but I think not.
Decimation hasn't been practised since the time of 
the Republic. To order it now would sen a 
message to the four legions of Britannia that they
had better fear my father than the tribes who
would attack them. The sad truth is that both the 
tribunes and the legates who have command now 
are new to their posts; it is not certain the  men 
would obey an order to beat to death one in ten of
their comrades. It isn't something we would wish
to test in current circumstances. The only
alternative is to subdue the local tribes without 
delay. We cannot fight a war in the west if there is 
a risk that the east will rise at our back.
Camulodunum must be made secure.'

Camulodunum. He named it Camul's dun,
home to the war god of the Trinovantes, not
Cunobelin's dun, as it had been before. All of the
Romans had done so since they first arrived, as if 
told this was its name. No-one living had considered it expedient to tell them otherwise.

Valerius did not correct him now. The perpetual
knot in his gut was shifting and changing, coming
alive with a flaring admixture of fear and anticipation. Whispers of raw terror traced lines up his
spine and with them a spark that blazed bright as 
the god's light and promised the blessed oblivion
of battle. He had seen too little of that, these last
four years.

Thoughtfully, he asked, 'You have two
thousand veterans in Camulodunum who have
been promised land when they retire. Whose land
will they be given to farm?'

Marcus Ostorius answered, 'The Trinovantes'.
Once the colony is formed, this place becomes an
extension of Rome, at which point the natives will
no longer have any legal claim to any of their
land.'

He said it as if the facts were obvious, which
they were not.

Stiffly - later, one could think unwillingly -Corvus said, 'Valerius . in Rome, only citizens
may own land. Only one of the Trinovantes has
been made a citizen, and he will retain his
steading. The rest of the population automatically
forfeits all land rights. It may be that the new
governor will choose to recompense the families
for their loss but he is not required to do so.'

The rumours had said as much, but sane men
did not believe them. Gripping his hands together
to keep them still, Valerius said, 'In that case, you
have no choice but to disarm the tribes immediately,
to crush them completely using utmost
force. Those who have half a mind to rebel will do
so but if you make examples of them, harshly, the
rest may subside. They will loathe us for it, but
they loathe us anyway. We have more to lose than
their high opinion.'

He was no longer obeying orders, but the
dictates of his body. The rising hairs on his neck
and the sweeping heat and cold in his belly and
the clash of weapons and the far-off cries of the
wounded were both a memory and a premonition.
He did not know the ways in which his face
changed as he spoke but he felt the stir in the air
and when he finally removed his gaze from the
blank wall on which battles had been fought and
lost, he found that it drifted, without his will, to
Corvus' face. The concern he read there surprised
him. Still, it was Marcus Ostorius, the governor's
son, who spoke. His voice was quiet, as it might
be were he speaking in the presence of one who
slept and must not be wakened.

'Why must we crush them so completely,
Valerius?'

'Because in taking their land, you are taking
their livelihood. They can live without weapons,
they know that even if their pride won't let them
admit it, but they can't live without the means to
eat. If the Twentieth departs and the Trinovantes
are still in possession of their weapons when the
veterans begin to take their fields, their cattle,
their grain, then you will have no colony by the
end of winter and the war here in the east wil
make the one happening now in the west look like
a petty skirmish. If the veterans are to have any
hope of survival, you must confiscate all of the
natives' weapons, punishing everyone who resists,
or you must kill them all down to the last child at 
the breast. Those are your only choices.'

VI.

'It is in my mind that a people faced with death or
slavery as their only choices are not readily going
to relinquish war.' 

Longinus said it, five days later, standing on the
rotting ice of the river. The Thracian's horses, who
were, indeed, his brothers, but no more than that,
had drunk from holes chipped at the water's edge
and were pawing holes in the snow to graze. The
mounts of Valerius' troop mingled with them as they
had done since the afternoon of their first meeting.

With their charges safe, the two horsemasters
had sought a wager that was hard enough to make
a satisfying win while still being within the bounds
of possibility and, at a stretch, of personal safety.
The treacherous, melting ice had provided the
answer. Each man was halfway to winning, or
losing, when Longinus brought up the topic of the
governor's speech.

It was a diversionary tactic, designed to thro
Valerius off his count, and the Thracian took care
to check the length of the river in both directions
before he spoke. Longinus might have been, rash,
even ridiculously prone to personal risk, but he 
was not stupid.

The governor had not ordered decimation, but 
three men had been flogged for sedition and none
had questioned the wisdom of Scapula's tactics in 
the west as explicitly as Longinus. Still, the 
mutterings continued. The disarming of the eastern
tribes had been accepted readily by the ranks; 
they were safer if the barbarians around the 
fortress were stripped of their weapons. The 
governor's inaugural speech, given in the freezing
hall of the praetoria, had made them far more
restless. Scapula was not a man to take his orders
lightly. He had been instructed to make the west 
safe and he had determined that the best way to do 
so was to extinguish the entire tribe of the Silures.
Nothing of such severity had been practised in the 
province since the invasion, or even threatened. It  ,
was all too easy to imagine the response the 
western warriors- when faced with the reality of a
governor who had sworn to kill every man, 
woman and child of their tribe.

Longinus rocked on the ice and spread his arms
for balance. 'You know them,' he said. 'Will the 
Silures let us kill their men and enslave their 
women and children as he has promised?'

Valerius said, 'If they do, it will be the first time 
in the history of their people. Only the Ordovices
are more savage and if they are united with the
Silures, nothing we can do will stop them. And
then as soon as word gets out of the governor's
threat, the other tribes who might have been
unsure of Rome's enmity will believe the dreamers
who tell them we come to destroy them all.'

This, too, was subversion, but no worse than
what had gone before and it did not put Valerius
off his counting. He leaned on a many-pronged
hazel stump that had been cut long and left as a
tethering post. With one hand, he tapped the rhythm of his heartbeat on the nearest stump. Out
on the river, Longinus did the same, although his
beat was noticeably faster. The Thracian stood
rock-steady on the chalky ice with his feet planted
squarely on either side of a crack the width of his
fist. He had bet that the ice would hold his weight
for the count of fifty heartbeats. In accepting,
Valerius had not thought to specify whose heart
should define the counting. He still believed he
would win.

Longinus said, 'So what you are saying is that
the governor has given the dreamers a gift and done
nothing to ... that's it ... forty-nine ... fifty ...
Now!'

He leaped a spear's length forward onto the
bank. Where his right foot had been, an ice plate
no thicker than a man's thumb tilted sideways into
sluggish water. He looked up, grinning his triumph. 'The falcon-headed dagger is mine, I
believe?'

The knife was small, of a length to fit in the
palm of the hand and not be seen. A small Horus
adorned the end of it, subtly carved, with tiny 
beads of jet as its eyes. It had been a gift from
Corvus in their days on the Rhine when the
invasion of Britannia had been a fiction, a joke men
shared at Caligula's expense. Once, it had
mattered to Valerius that he keep the blade. Now,
he reversed it so that the handle faced the
Thracian and then spun it high with an added
twist so that to catch it unharmed was, in itself, an
achievement.

Smiling, Longinus reached out and snatched the
thing from the air. If he knew that Corvus, prefect 
of the Quinta Gallorum, took the falcon god as his 
personal emblem, he did not remark upon it.
Sitting on the hard-packed snow, he said, 'When
the governor first made his speech, I had hopes
that the western tribes might never come to hear
of it. Since then, however, I have been drinking,in
the sewer taverns that you recommended. The
word in the bottom of the wine cups is that the
enemy dreamers can send their spirits as white
birds to fly on the wind and that a single word, carelessly spoken, will be carried back to those
who guide them. Is it true?'

The horses moved out in larger circles to graze.  One of them disturbed a winter hare that neither men nor horses had known was there until she 
started up and ran for safety, a white rag, windblown over snow. On the far bank of the river, a
dog fox stalked prey too small to be seen. A
buzzard flew, mewling, across the god's arc of
unblemished blue. Each, in its own way, journeyed
west, towards Mona.

The fox pounced, delicately lethal. Valerius
heard the small squeal of a vole, dying. He lay
back in the hard-packed snow and watched the
buzzard ride the wind. If he had the knack, and if
other gods than Mithras had not forbidden it, he
could see how it would be possible to slough off
his body and mount the sky to fly as that one flew.
If he pressed a thumb to the scar of the god's
brand and felt again the pain and the way it had
spun him out of himself into darkness, then it was
not so hard to take the separate parts of his soul
and let one out, as if on a thread, to rise up into
the greying blue of the sky, to feel the buffeting
wind press his body and give lift to his wings, to
look down on a small herd of horses, feeding in
snow, and the two men beside them, one lying
vacant-eyed, the other bending over him in
anxious solicitude.

'Valerius?' A hand passed in front of his eyes,
breaking the thread too fast and too hard.
Longinus' face loomed too close, his breath sour
with last night's wine. 'Julius Valerius? Did you
hear me? I was asking if their dreamers could
listen to men's thoughts and carry word to their
people? Will they take word of Scapula's threats
back to the warriors?'

The man was far too close. Valerius remembered,
thickly, why he preferred to water the
horses alone. He stood, brushing snow from his
legs, making a distance between himself and the
Thracian and whistled the pied horse. It came
promptly; better than anything else alive, it knew
precisely the quality of Valerius' temper and
that precise line which, when crossed, made it
unwise to refuse an order. The beast would take its
revenge later; this was understood.

Riding back, Longinus kept his distance. He
had awaited a reply and, when none came, had 
mounted and turned his horse to follow without
further comment. They were within reach of the gates when Valerius reined in his horse.

Without turning, he said, 'The dreamers may be
able to do as you say. I don't know; I have never 
seen it. But even if they can't, soldiers talk, and a
nervous man passes on the threats of the strength
he perceives behind him. The first time they face
each other across a barricade, some stripling of the 
Second still in swaddling will shout it at the 
warriors who are about to take his life, and if just
one of them understands Latin and lives beyond
the battle, the rest will know the full measure of the governor's threat.'

Longinus smiled, lopsidedly. 'Then we had best
hope they speak no Latin.'

'Caradoc speaks it, who leads them. And the 
dreamers. If they send their spirits anywhere with
word of what they hear, it's to their fellow dreamers
who live among the tribes. Before full winter, every
warrior in every one of the western tribes will kno
that Scapula intends to eradicate all memory of the
Silures. It will not improve the peace.'

Two days later, the XXth legion, newly replenished and missing only a single cohort left behind in Camulodunum to guard the governor, marched west through melting snow to the aid of
the II nd Augusta. They took with them food and firewood, weapons and armour, horses, mules
and men, to replace those lost in the fighting. In the flurry of their leaving and its protracted
preparation, the men of the two cavalry wings remaining in the fortress were given their orders, which were systematically to disarm the local
tribes. The manoeuvre was to be prosecuted with
force but not violence, as if the one could readily
be separated from the other. Particular care was
to be taken, however, at the steading of an elder
of the Trinovantes who was a personal friend of
the Emperor Claudius. The same elder had volunteered to make available a smith who would destroy the weapons of his warriors. For such
local knowledge, the elder was paid handsomely
by the new governor. What the tribes thought of
him, Valerius could only guess.

'His name is Heffydd. He was one of their priests
who served the old king Cunobelin and did not
care much for the man's sons. He took control
of the dun in the chaos after the invasion and
ordered the people to welcome Claudius when
he rode in on his elephants at the head of his
legions. He saved the first governor the inconvenience
of a siege and spared the emperor the risk of injury. He was made a citizen by Claudius
himself. We are to treat him with due respect.'

It was Regulus, the troop's decurion, who 
spoke. He had the air of a man who talks to fillthe
silence and the silence was winning. Those around
him nodded or smiled, according to rank, and said 
nothing; a good soldier does not chatter on his
way to war.

Valerius rode in the second pair beside
Umbricius, his troop's actuary, one of the three
men with whom he shared a billet. The man was 
pleasant enough company and did not make conversation for the sake of it, which made it possible
to shut out the day. The Crow-horse stretched its 
legs and listened to what was asked of it.
Somewhere amongst the hoofbeats of the dozen 
nearest horses, Valerius could hear one striding 
short and put some effort into locating both the 
beast and the lame limb by sound alone. Almost,
he could have forgotten where they were going
and why, but that Regulus, ever wary of silence,
would not let him.

'The Trinovante steading is over the rise, in the 
lee of the dyke. There's a fort this side of it,
abandoned now. Claudius ordered it built when it
seemed the elder's family might be the subjectof
reprisals by the natives. The Batavians manned the
place before their quarters were ready within
the fortress. I don't know which would be worse - 
being vilified as a collaborator by your own
people or left under the protection of Civilis and
his homicidal tribesmen.'

An officer of the Thracians laughed dutifully.
Behind him, the men of the Quinta Gallorum
maintained a studied silence. Regulus was Roman
and had only the barest understanding of what it
was to be a people occupied by force. His troop,
almost to a man, were Gauls whose recent
ancestors had fought against Rome and whose
tribal elders still told tales of the great heroes and
their tragic subjugation. From childhood, they had
been able to name those families whose members
had aided the enemy and profited by it. They
knew exactly which of Regulus' options would be
worse.

The two troops rode past the skeleton of the
abandoned fort, now stripped of all wood, and
down a long, shallow slope to the farmstead
beyond. The place was bounded by a ditch and a
dyke, but no stockade. Miraculously, trees still
grew around it; by the emperor's express order,
they had been spared the axes of the legion.
Valerius had forgotten what it was to ride through
woodland under the gaze of winter crows with
snow scattered like salt on black branches and
dying leaves spinning light in the wind. He
touched his brand and made the sign of the raven
as the birds launched upwards, cawing. Seeing it,
Regulus raised a brow but said nothing. Soon
after his arrival in Camulodunum, he had made
known his wish to serve the god and it seemed likely that, come spring and the next initiation, he would do so. Until then, he was as ignorant of the
god's ways as any other man.

Within the ring of trees, fat, long-horned cattle
grazed in pasture better than that reserved for the 
cavalry mounts near the fortress. A red and white 
patched bull raised his head as the line of horses 
approached. He snuffed the air for danger to his 
herd and, seeing none, returned to the hawthorn
hedge on which he had been grazing, lashing a
long tongue round surviving fragments of  green.
At the fortress, the beef had long since been killed
and salted for winter. Here, there was good
grass and the neatness of the surrounding fields 
promised fodder for winter. This was not yet the 
country of people ground down by punitive taxes 
or the privations of war.

 Wide The steading itself sat atop a small rise. A
track led up the slope to a gap in the turf bank. 
Within, smoke rose from the fires of four round-houses and a number of smaller huts. In the spaces 
between, workshops, log sheds and granaries 
stood closed to the snow. Somewhere out of sight, 
a tethered hound set up a frantic baying andwas
joined by others, all at different pitches, so that the 
noise upset the horses and destroyed the mellow
mood of the men.

'Gods take them, they're doing that deliberately.' Regulus turned in his saddle. 'Where are 
their warriors? We should have seen themby
now.'

It was the question Valerius had just asked of 
himself and the god. He said, 'I don't know. But 
they know we're coming and why. There maybe
warriors even amongst the homestead of a
collaborator who would rather die than surrender
their weapons. We should perhaps assume they're
prepared to fight, in which case we could go in
fast and break for the battle line at the top of the
hill. It will let them see we are ready to engage if it
comes to that.'

'Good.' Regulus signalled Sabinius, the
standard-bearer, who rode at his left hand. 'Give
us a full gallop forward and then break at the top
of the hill. Bring us as close to the gates as you
can.'

It was what the cavalry had trained for. In two
columns, horses and men who had practised
manoeuvres to the point of tedium and beyond
through a summer of no action, readied themselves
for a brief burst of controlled speed.
Regulus said, 'Now!' and the standards stabbed
the sky and sixty-four horses broke from a walk to
a gallop, keeping in pairs. The eyes of their riders
remained fixed on their standards, waiting for the
order to change. Valerius, whose mind was torn
too many ways, heard at last that the lame horse
was the chestnut gelding with a white blaze ridden
by the decurion of Longinus' troop. That was
unfortunate. The man was a superior officer and
could not be reprimanded and Valerius would
have liked, just then, to shout at someone.
Deprived of the opportunity, he held the Crow horse
to a steady gallop and man and beast fought
each other for the chance to run all the way up the
long slope to the steading.

In one moment, the gateway was empty; in
the next, Gaius Claudius Heffydd, by gift of the
emperor citizen of Rome, filled the space from
edge to edge, made broad by the billowing of his 
cloak in the wind. Heffydd was not a young man;
his hair was entirely white, kept in place by a
thong of twisted birch bark at the brow. In the
whole of the east, he was the only man openly to
wear the mark of the dreamers, now forbidden.
That in itself set him apart from his peers. His 
cloak was the yellow of gorse flowers and the 
reflection of it leaked like melted butter on
the remnants of snow at his feet. He bore a spear
with a blade such as one might use for hunting
boar and a battle sword hung from one shoulder.
Sabinius was as good a standard-bearer as any 
in the province. At the right moment, without
any additional command from either Regulus or
Valerius, he raised his standard high. Two troops
of cavalry, acting as one man, spread sideways and 
halted, precisely in line. The Gauls, Valerius
thought, were that fraction sharper than the 
Thracians. A part of him rejoiced.

The echo of hooves hushed to nothing. In the 
pause while no decisions were made or orders
given, Heffydd stepped forward and stooped to
lay both of his weapons in a cross on the ground
before Regulus' horse. Behind him, the hidden
hounds reached a frantic climax and held it. Of 
the hundred or more warriors reputed to be in the 
steading, there was still no sign.

The two decurions, Roman and Thracian,
dismounted together and walked forward to meet the
dreamer. Valerius sat rigidly still and fixed his
gaze on the half-white left ear of the pied horse.
He was close to Heffydd and did not wish to be.
In the morass of regret and recrimination that
infected his mind, his hatred of the Trinovantes
burned as an unsullied flame.

His mother never taunted him with memories of
Cunobelin or his people, she had no need. Long
before he had sworn allegiance to Rome, Valerius
had sworn the death of the three sons of
Cunobelin and as many of their tribe as he could
send with them. Two parts of that oath were fulfilled:
Amminios had died in Gaul and Togodubnos
had been mortally wounded in the first day of the invasion
battle. Only Caradoc was left alive, the
unmatched warrior who had offered Valerius friendship
and then betrayed him.

News of Caradoc, last surviving son of
Cunobelin, came daily from the west with word
of his part in the resistance. When the messengers
had presented themselves to the governor and
been dismissed, Valerius bought them drinks and a meal worth a month's pay and drained them dry
of details, the better to know his enemy. On the
good nights - the ones when his mother did not
visit - Valerius dreamed the many deaths of
Caradoc and his own part in each. When he
prayed to the god, most often he prayed that at
least one of these dreams be granted.

Heffydd was not Caradoc, but he wore a yellow
cloak and he was within close reach, which made
him a good substitute. The pity of it was that the
auxiliaries had been ordered not to kill a single
native without due cause. The governor, in his
briefing to the officers, had been explicit.

'Use all necessary force but do not start the war
afresh. Don't enter their homes unless they give
cause. If any one of them resists, make of him an
example the rest will never forget, but do not wipe
them out.' Scapula had stared specifically at
Valerius as he said, 'Remember, I want a docile
tribe of farmers who will grow grain and make
profit to pay off their loans to the emperor, not
heaps of charred bone on the funeral pyres. These
people are the tax revenue that pays the legions
and dead men pay no taxes. If you kill too many
of them, you'll see it reflected sorely in your pay.'
Scapula had smiled then, and the effect was not
nearly as becoming as in his son, but he was
governor, second only to the emperor within the
province, and every man present had laughed.

Dead men pay no taxes. Valerius eased forward
in the saddle and ran a hand down the pied horse's
neck. It was important to remember, for it and
him, that they should remain calm.

Heffydd waited above his surrendered weapons,
The gesture was an empty one. As the sole Roman
citizen among the Trinovantes, his own weapons
were not forfeit and he must have known it. He
was, therefore, sending a message either to his
still-hidden warriors or to the troops who came to
disarm them. If the latter, Valerius could not
imagine what that message might be.

Regulus did not appear to be seeking an explanation. Dismounting, he lifted both blades,
examined them, exclaimed at their workmanship
and returned both to the emperor's friend.
Valerius, who had been granted his citizenship by
a different emperor and knew exactly its worth,
chose to look elsewhere - and froze as a flagging
of yellow cloaks caught his eye.

Warriors. They had moved forward silently
from behind each of the roundhouses, a good
hundred of them, all on horseback, all armed for
battle with their circular bull's-hide shields loose
on their shoulders and their spears at their backs
and their great ancestral long swords naked in
their hands.

'Father of All Light, they are going to fight us.'
Valerius breathed it like a prayer, thanks for his
wish fulfilled. His sword grip came clammily to
his hand, loose in its oiled sheath. The Crow-horse
quivered once, all over, and then stood rock-still
beneath him, like a hound on point. To Sabinius,
he said, 'Be ready to signal the--'

'My lord, no.' Heffydd was at his bridle, too
close, too fast, to both horse and rider. Valerius
could smell rosemary on his hair and wormwood
on his breath. Underneath both, he smelled age
and corruption. The dreamer's eyes were
yellowed and cloudy. Valerius fought to avoid
meeting their gaze.

The old man said, 'We do not come to fight you.
Our warriors offer no offence. They merely wish
to honour the general in the surrender of their
weapons. I have shown the way and they will
follow.'

Regulus was not, and never would be, a general
and he was too old to respond to flattery. From
behind the old man's back, he gave a flat hand
signal to Valerius. Aloud, he said, 'Duplicarius, it
seems they wish to surrender their weapons with
some formality. We should allow them to do so,
provided it offers no threat. You will take the men
as we agreed and see to the disarming. Be
courteous while they offer us no discourtesy. I will
remain with the priest and take his hospitality.'

The hand signal said, more privately, And he is
our hostage for their good behaviour.

Valerius nodded, crisply.

Beside him, Sabinius raised a brow. 'Do I signal
the dismount?'

'Not while the bastards are still mounted.'

Valerius spun the pied horse out of line. Raising
his voice to reach the most distant of the men, he
said, 'Re-form the columns until we're through the
gates then break sideways again for a battle line.
Keep it sharp and don't move above a trot. The
first one who touches his weapon without leave
will regret it.'

Sabinius still awaited his signal. Valerius raised
his arm and led his men through the gap in the
encircling rampart to face the waiting warriors.
There, because he had to, he stopped.

He had expected many things, but not a
spectacle such as he saw now. He had forgotten,
completely, the splendour of the tribes when they
chose to display their wealth. The Gauls and the
Thracians of the two cavalry troops sported their
tribal brooches and some wore short-sleeved mail
expressly to display the enamelled armbands
beneath. Such things were allowed by their
commanders provided they did not interfere with
the men's safety, nor become a focus for factions
and in-fighting. To Roman eyes, and those who
had spent too long in Roman company, they
looked gaudy and not a little barbarian. Here,
matched against the dazzling splendour of the
Trinovantes, they looked simply impoverished.

The tribes might have lost a two-day battle and,
with it, a war, but they had not yet lost their pride,
nor had they been required to melt down their
armbands or torcs to cast into coins for the
payment of taxes; they wore their wealth and their
heritage on their arms with manifest pride. Their
horses, too, were sleekly fit on a summer's good
grazing and polished to outshine their gold. At
least half were better bred than the mounts of the
cavalry. As Sabinius signalled the halt, Valerius
saw finally that the warriors wore their hair
braided on the left side, and woven into each
strand were black crow feathers with fine bands of
gold wire encircling the quills. Raw joy floated
from his chest to his head, dizzyingly.

'They're wearing their kill-feathers,' he said.

'What?'

'The feathers in their hair signify a kill. The
colour of the band tells you who died and how. A
gold band signifies one or more legionaries; the
width defines the exact number. They are letting us
know that they fought against us in the invasion.'

'Then they need to know that they will never
fight again.' Umbricius, the actuary, was on his
left. The man had a wound in the groin from a
native warrior that had left him uncertainly potent
and he both feared them and ached for revenge.

Valerius motioned him forward. 'You and
Sabinius dismount and leave your horses here. As
we agreed, mark a place where the weapons are to
be left. We'll call the smith to break them later;
first, we need to see how they plan to hand them
over.' An idea was growing inside him of what he
would do in the same circumstances, knowing
what the warriors must know. The threat of it left 
a taste like raw iron in his mouth. He swallowed,
drily, and waited.

The two officers marked out the rectangle five
paces by ten as had already been agreed. Before
they completed it, a single rider walked his horse
forward from the centre of the warriors' line. The
man was huge, bigger than any of the auxiliaries,
with the red-gold hair of his people and the bearing of an emperor. He wore the brilliant yellow
cloak of the Trinovantes as his birthright and his
blade was bright with the honing of generations.
He balanced it flat across his palms and then, in a 
breathtaking display of horsemanship, pushed his
horse to a full gallop and executed a perfect circle
around the rectangle just marked out. At the end,
he halted, dismounted, and knelt before 
Umbricius.

'Jupiter, father of all the gods, I don't believe
this.' Sabinius was a chieftain's son of the Parisii
before he was ever a standard-bearer for the
Quinta Gallorum. His eyes were wide and bright.
'If he places that sword at Umbricius' feet, he'll
find himself with his guts round his ankles.'

Valerius smiled tightly. 'Not unless Umbricius
wants to spend the next two days watching his skin
being flayed from his body he won't.'

For a long time after he joined the legions,
Valerius had not understood the true value of
discipline. Here and now, it came home to him,
perfectly. Umbricius the Gaul, humiliated beyond
all endurance, would undoubtedly have done
his best to kill the red-haired giant who knelt
at his feet in an exact parody of Vercingetorix'
surrender to Caesar in the time of his grandfathers
- and would have died for it. Umbricius the
trained auxiliary, in testament to a dozen floggings
and an uncounted number of nights' fatigues,
remained standing at perfect attention while the
giant surrendered his spear and his battle knife,
either one of which would have killed the Gaul
before he could raise his sword. Smiling, the redhaired
warrior stepped back.

Amongst the ranks of the auxiliaries, men who
had not been breathing breathed. Valerius found
his hands sticky and refrained from wiping them
on his thighs; he, too, could hold his discipline.

Longinus was beside him, dependably solemn.
Looking down to adjust his horse's harness, he
murmured, 'There are over a hundred of them. We
can't let them all do that.'

'We don't have to. See? The others are
dismounting. They've made their point and they
know it. There isn't a Gaul in the entire wing who
hasn't been reminded of how his ancestors were
conquered by the army for which he now fights.
The first Thracian who finds this amusing will
have his skull crushed and his balls ripped off.
Make sure your men know that.'

'I think they do. Look at them.'

Valerius turned. Along the lines of horsemen,
the air was crisp with the threat of violence. Not a
single Thracian auxiliary smiled.

Valerius turned to the men of his own
command. Now that the time for action had
come, he found he could immerse himself in that
and not think ahead. To Sabinius, he said, 'Signal
the dismount. Break into fours, one to hold the
mounts, the three others to take the weapons. Split
the natives into groups. Don't let them bunchh.
Confiscate their weapons but leave their shields.
Only if they rebel will they forfeit those as well.'

It was what they had planned, if not exactly
how they had planned it. The men worked, as they
slept, in groups of four. They spread out along the
line of warriors and divided them into groups,
herding them back towards the roundhouses and
workshops. A handful of children came to take the
natives' horses and it was clear that this, too, had
been planned. The warriors simply knelt now, and
placed their weapons at the auxiliaries' feet. It was
not the exact mimicry of Vercingetorix' surrender
that the red giant had enacted, but a close enough
shadow. Moreover, by retaining their shields, the
warriors held on to a sense of security. It was not
good but it was the governor's command.

The troopers were efficient, as their training
required. They were still outnumbered but not at
such a disadvantage as they had been. They could
call on five hundred more horse and as many
legionaries at need and both sides knew it; in this
lay their true strength. Alone of his command,
Valerius remained mounted and back from the
groups in a place where he could keep watch over
all of them. The first of his fears had been realized.
The rest might yet be.

He knew the worst when he saw the remaining
children return. A small crowd gathered to the left
of one of the roundhouses. They were boys and
girls in equal numbers, dressed alike in their gorse-yellow
cloaks, all brooched and banded, all too
young to wear kill-feathers but old enough to have
been at the invasion battle, if not fighting, then
carrying water or holding the horses or mending
broken weapons behind the lines. They were of
that age, coming up to their warrior's tests, when
insecurity plays against bravado and both overwhelm
reason.

Gaudinius, the troop's armourer, had stooped to
take up a blade when a tall, skinny, dark-haired
girl advanced on him. Hatred splintered clear in
her eyes and leaked from the sheen on her skin.
The notches of ancient use showed clearly on the
surrendered blade, honed down through the generations
but never ground away. Like a warrior's
scars, they were a constant source of pride; to lose
them at any age was unbearable, to lose them
within sight of the long-nights, and adulthood, was
something to kill for, whatever the cost. Valerius
saw the rock in the girl's hand, raised to strike.

'Not now, damn you.' He had been holding the
reins of his company's horses. He threw them to
Umbricius, who was near. 'Hold them. Be ready
to mount.'

The pied horse was already moving. Valerius
pushed forward and the crowd, as a mass, edged
back. There were more of them now; men and
women who were not warriors had joined the
throng, watching in silent accusation. The girl
thought she could still throw her stone, even
having been seen. Valerius leaned down and
caught her arm before she could raise it high
enough. A tall, lean woman with the same black
hair was already at her other side. In formal
Trinovantian, Valerius said, 'They have orders to
make examples of the troublemakers. If your
daughter wishes to die, she might choose a way
that will not cause her family also to suffer.'

He had not been sure he could remember the
language until the need came. They stared at him,
mother, child and the crowd behind, disbelieving
their ears. The girl tipped her head back. In the
same tongue, Valerius said, 'If she spits, I will have
her flogged. She will not survive it.'

The woman wore eight kill-feathers, all broadly
banded in gold, and had just laid the blade of her
ancestors at the feet of the enemy with all the
dignity she could muster. She could, it seemed,
control her daughter as well as she controlled herself
and that without words. The crowd parted
and let them through and, when Valerius looked
round, the other children, too, had gone. He drew
his horse back and circled it to where his men
waited. Stooping, he retrieved the reins from
Umbricius, who stared at him. 'Why did you do
that?'

Valerius had acted on instinct and surprised
himself. She reminded me of someone I once
knew. Aloud, he said, 'She's a child. If we had
flogged her, she'd die.'

'So? A child doesn't pay taxes. Myself, I think
she is exactly what the governor had in mind when
he--'

He stopped. Valerius had said nothing, nor
needed to. Umbricius had, crossed him only once
and would not forget it. Frustrated, the man said,
'So who do we take as an example when every one
of the bastards kneels at our feet and gives us what
we ask?'

Valerius smiled grimly. Be patient.-There will be
one. They won't all give up that easily.'

He believed it, although it was still not clear
who amongst the Trinovantes might be prepared
to take a risk. The tension increased after the
children dispersed but the desperate theatre continued,
as if each warrior had been schooled to the
part. In a while, when the pile of gathered
weapons had reached knee height, Valerius
ordered the smith to bring his forging block into
the open and break the blades.

Big, broad and red-headed, the smith was the
exceptional horseman who had first laid his
weapons at Umbricius' feet. He had seemed the
most likely to rebel but even when ordered to
break what his ancestors had made, he did not do
so. Sabinius, who had once been armourer to the
troop and understood the value of what was being
destroyed, said, 'He would make a good auxiliary,
could we persuade him to fight for us.'

Valerius said, 'His grandsons maybe, or those
who come after. This one will never be anything
but an enemy.'

Enemy or not, the giant was a methodical man.
He broke each blade exactly in half, laying the
hilts with their decorated pommels to one side and
the blade-tips to the other. It was not fast work. A
blade that has seen the wars of five generations,
that has been tempered in the blood of a hundred
enemy warriors, does not break easily. Some had
to be heated before they would break and that
took time. The harshness of burning metal caught
at the throat and stung the eyes. The auxiliaries
coughed and wiped their faces and continued with
the work. Only the natives remained dry-eyed.

The change came at the final roundhouse. A
young warrior with startling corn-gold hair knelt
and laid his sword at the feet of Gaudinius, the
armourer. It was a good blade; the weld-patterns
woven in the metal stood out proudly from nights
of polishing and the hilt was tightly bound in
copper wire, but the pommel was plain, lacking
enamel, and, while the warrior wore four
gold-banded kill-feathers, the blade itself bore no
notches to show it had been used in battle.

Valerius was already behind Gaudinius when
the warrior rocked back on his heels and it was to
Valerius that the youth's eyes rose. They held a
defiance, a guarded question and perhaps, in their
depths, a plea. Word had passed, then, that
Valerius spoke their language. What had not
passed with it, because it was not known, was the
depth of his loathing for their people and
the identity of the man who had spawned it.

The moment of decision was not without
turmoil; Valerius still believed in the laws of
honour and maintained an abiding respect for
personal dignity. Had the warrior's hair been other
than gold, had his nose been less distinctive, had
his eyes not been that particular iron-grey so that
one could less readily imagine Caradoc's smile
beneath them and Caradoc's soul within, what
followed might have been different. They were
not. The Crow-horse pushed between the man and
the crowd.

'Stop.'

Gaudinius had stooped to pick up the sword.
He froze and then stood, empty-handed.

Valerius said, 'He's giving you a false weapon.
This is not the blade of his ancestors.'

He said it in Latin, as was required, and then
repeated it in Trinovantian. The scuffle had been
noted. Already, Longinus was at the pied horse's
shoulder. Others ran to assist, forming a defensive
knot. Valerius registered their presence as he
would register the arrival of reinforcements in
battle - distantly and without taking his attention
from the enemy who would kill him. His gaze was
locked entirely with that of the young, corn-haired
warrior who had just tried to save the blade of his
ancestors.

The youth was a good actor; he could control
his face, but not his eyes. Anger followed shock
and was followed in turn by a brief, swamping
despair. Valerius knew that feeling intimately, the
desolation of the soul when what one has most
feared becomes reality. He knew also where it led.
He was ready long in advance for the moment
when the warrior took refuge in action.

The blade lying flat on the beaten earth was not
the one with which the corn-haired man had
grown to adulthood, not the one with which he
had killed so often in battle, but it was good and
he had used it enough to have the feel for its
weight and swing. Certainly it was enough to kill
a young officer who had lost his battle-sharpness.
Gaudinius died where he stood, spraying blood
from his opened throat. A Thracian auxiliary
would have been next if Longinus had not
slammed into the man's shoulder, hurling him
sideways so that the killing blow cut only the flesh
of his upper arm.

The warrior backed against the wall of the
roundhouse and was joined by two others and,
yes, finally, as had been clear all along, the red-headed
smith was one of them. Valerius felt a
moment's exhilaration, tainted with an unexpected
sorrow that one with such dignity should choose
to die in such a manner, and then the Crow-horse,
following a barely articulate thought, rose above
the gathering melee and drove a smashing forefoot
down in a blow not even a giant could resist. The
beast relied on his rider to block the weapon that
would slice open its guts and Valerius did so,
wielding a cavalry sword that was the best Rome
could offer and did not come close to the quality
of the blades that it met.

Yet it was enough and the sparks flew high over
the thatched roof of the roundhouse and Regulus
was yelling, 'Don't kill them all. I want one to
hang,' and then, too soon, it was over, with the
corn-haired warrior alive and the smith and a
woman dead, but not one with dark hair and an
unruly daughter, for which, surprisingly, Valerius
found he was grateful.

The governor had wanted an example and he was
given it. They flogged the corn-haired warrior
before they hanged him and it seemed likely he
would have died of the one if they had waited too
long for the other. A half-troop of auxiliaries took
a pole from the wood store and balanced it on two
uprights between the harness hut and the granary
and raised the man until only the tips of his toes
touched the ground. In the time that he took
dying, which was not short, Regulus divided the
auxiliaries into three groups and sent them out:
one to guard the natives, one to collect and burn
their shields - now forfeit on the governor's orders -
and the third to search each of the roundhouses
and huts for other weapons.

Sabinius said, 'One of the roundhouses belongs
to the priest. He's a citizen.'

Regulus spat. 'And one of his warriors
murdered my armourer. If he resists, hang him
alongside his man.'

All pretence of civilization, of dignity and
courtesy, was gone. The search was brutal and
effective. For each weapon already surrendered,
they found spear-heads, battle knives or full blades
hidden in the thatch, under the beds, in the small,
secret places in the corners.

Valerius, who knew better than most where to
look, took Sabinius and Umbricius and searche
the granary and the harness hut where he found a
cache of spears bound up in leather hidden
beneath a stack of stiff, unworked hides. Out in
the open, the auxiliaries broke the hafts and threw
them on the fire made of the shields. The spear-heads
were added to the bundles of broken blades
to be taken away by the auxiliaries when they left.
One place remained untouched, a small hut on
the western edge of the enclosure. Half a dozen
hounds bayed from behind the black mare's hide
that blocked the doorway but that was not the
reason the men were reluctant to enter. On the
lintel, the marks of Nemain and Briga were clear;
a crescent moon hung above the sinuous waves
of a river, a wren circled above a foaling mare.
Newly carved and dyed in red, a she-wolf stalked
a skinny goat, a ram and a bull.

It may not have been widely known that the
Quinta Gallorum took the Capricorn as its
emblem, nor the Prima Thracum Aries, but anyone
who had watched the governor's arrival
closely and seen the display of standards could
have deduced it. Very few outside the legions
should have known the significance of the bull,
but the troops standing outside the hut knew
exactly what it meant, both for themselves and for
the ones who had cut and painted the image. Half
a dozen gathered a spear's length from the doorway,
making the sign to ward off evil. None would
go inside.

Valerius stood closer, listening to the hounds
within. His brand ached. Sabinius joined him. He
was braver than most. 'We should take some of
the women and make them go in ahead of us,' he
said.

'No. It is safer if we go in alone.'

Sabinius stared at him. 'We?'

Valerius smiled, a thing he had not done in days.
'No, just me. Bring me a lit torch and then wait at
the fires. If I don't come out soon, burn the place
without coming in. Whatever's inside will be
destroyed in the flames.'

'Including you.'

'Yes. You can come in and look for me if you
want but I wouldn't advise it. No-one will blame
you if you don't.'

Sometime in the day he had remembered the
words of Trinovantian that were used to calm
hounds. He spoke them now. By the time Sabinius
returned with the torch, the beasts within were
almost silent. In the steading was an equal hush.
Feeling the eyes of every woman in the tribe burn
into his back, Valerius pushed back the mare's
hide and entered.

It was not a big hut. The hounds were tethered
on either side of the door. They strained against
their collars, whining hoarsely, choking themselves in their need to reach him. Speaking softly,
he loosed them one by one, ruffling his hands
through the coarse hair of their necks, and they
gathered about him, testing the smells of blood,
hate and fear. They were bigger than any hound of
the legions and had been kept fit. If the day had
gone differently, he might have been able to trade
for one. Now, the natives would cut the throat of
any hound he asked for rather than let him take it.
'Go now.' He said it in their own tongue, opening
the door-flap, and the beasts spilled out in a
joyful rush, not knowing that the world to which
they returned had changed beyond all recognition.
With the hounds gone, the place seemed bigger.
The torch burned feebly, as if lacking air. Within
moments, it went out. Valerius could have left the
flap open for more light but did not. A fire was lit
on the western wall. Thin smoke rose to the roof
and passed out through a baffled hole. The flame
gave light enough. Searching along the junction of
wall and floor near the door, he found a knife
honed to razor sharpness and put it to one side.
Instinct, and three nights' dreams, told him there
was more than that to be found.

'You should ask my leave, dreamer, before you
take my blade.'

He nearly killed her. His sword sliced through
smoke and a brief, curling flame and stopped only
because his mind caught up with his body and a
single word of what he had just heard made no
sense. Keeping his guard, he relit the torch to give
himself more light and saw, hunched on the far side
of the fire in the darkest corner, a woman older
than any he had seen outside in the steading. Her
face was the creased bark of the oldest oak,
her hair had thinned almost to baldness, leaving
white strands trailing from a pink scalp. Her eyes
were oddly clear where he would have expected
cloudedness. She was a true grandmother and there
had been none like her amongst the gathered
crowd. He should have noticed that and had not.
He cursed his inattention.

The old woman watched him with the sharp
regard of a hunting bird, a thrush seeking beetles
in dung. Unbelievably, she smiled. 'Welcome,
dreamer. I have waited since dawn. You are not in
the hurry I had thought.'

That word again, and a tone that came straight
from his childhood. Your mark could have been
the horse. Or the hare ... The skin crept on
Valerius' neck. 'I am not a dreamer,' he said.

'Are you not, so? Your mother would be sad to
hear it.'

'My mother?' The sword quivered in his hand,
a thing alive seeking blood. With effort he
restrained it. 'My mother is dead.'

'As is her son in soul, it seems, if not in body.'
The old woman grinned at his discomfort. 'Why
are you here?'

'To gather weapons. Rome would have peace.
This is a means to achieve it.'

'If by peace you mean subjugation, yes.' She
cocked her head. 'So, if you will not answer
clearly, I will ask it another way. Why do you
gather weapons for Rome who was born to fight
against it?'

He swayed on his feet. In the darkness was the 
echo of the god's silence of the wine-cellar crypt.
In a voice below the threshold of hearing, his
mother spoke the litany of his nightmares. You are
forsaken. The gods condemn you to life. Hoarsely, he said, 'I have no choice.'

'Ha! There speaks a man of the bull.' She was
laying fine, dry twigs on the fire. Small flames
danced in the rolling shadows. Smoke rose to
Valerius' nostrils. An old, forgotten part of him
coded its separate strands: hawthorn, rowan, yew.
He sneezed on something harsher than any of
those and was confused until it came again and he
recognized the bitterness of singed hair. No grandmother burned animal hair without evoking the
strength it offered.

'What are you doing?' he asked.

'See for yourself.'

She passed him a handful of twigs from the pile
at her side. He used its light to seek out those
bound with hair. Unwinding one, he found what
he already knew would be there: curled hairs in
red and white taken from the poll of a red and
white patched bull. He dropped them all on the
fire. Thick smoke fanned up to fill his head. In
the density of it, he heard many women's voices,
laughing, and the bellow of a bullock at
castration. The bones of his skeleton crept from
his flesh. He tasted death and a fear that battle had
never brought him. Again, more desperately, he
said, 'I have no choice. I had none in the time of
battles and I have none now.'

'You are wrong. There is always choice and no
oath is binding but we make it so.' Her voice was
clear and louder than the rushing in his ears. She
waved her hands through the dense air. 'See, I
offer another choice clearly now. Turn round.
There is a cloak behind you. Take it and put it on.'

He had not seen the cloak. The folds hung
softly, of finest wool. Lifting it towards the firelight,
he found it was blue, the colour of the sky
after rain, with a border worked in russet. His
sister had worn a cloak of exactly that colour the
last time he had fought at her side. She wore
the grey of Mona now, and despised him. The
gorge rose in his throat. In his hollow heart, his
mother said a second time, You are forsaken.

With shaking hands, he returned the cloak to its
peg. Like a child, he said, 'I can't wear this. If I
walked out with it on, they would hang me.'

The grandmother mocked him. 'There are other
choices, dreamer. You can wear it openly or in
your heart. Either way you would find the
welcome you crave.'

'I crave nothing.'
'Liar.' She was standing now, a small thing,
barely up to the god's brand on his chest. Her
voice carried the power of centuries. No man
could withstand it. 'All your life you have craved
but one thing - a true belonging to your people
and your gods. I offer it now, a gift freely given.
Leave here now, knowing it possible, or know
yourself by your own hand for ever cursed.'

'No.'

The one thing the god had taught him was how
not to hear the voice of deity. In the darkness of
the crypt, that voice had not been directed solely
at him. Here, in the bitter blackness of a place his
mere presence defiled, he was the single point on
which it focused, resounding in his soul. The
brand on his chest burned as if new, holding him
captive in his body. His mother's voice was silent, withdrawing even that support. He put his
hands over his ears and blocked out the gods, the
crackle of the fire, the voice of an old woman,
weaving him to a death beyond which was only
desolation.

'No.' It came the second time through tight
teeth, robbed of conviction. The bull-smoke wreathed his head, holding him as ivy holds oak.
Tendrils invaded his mind, eating at his sense of self. The old woman loomed over him, crooning in
the tones of an elder grandmother, of the elder
grandmother. 'Take it, child. It is your birthright.
The man who made it was a dreamer before he
was a warrior. It will sing for you.' She was not
speaking only of the cloak. Something greater
than bull-hair burned on the fire.

'No!' 

In her desperation, in her flagrant use of power,
was the strength he needed. Thrusting her away,
he kicked the fire apart, scattering hair and hide
and burning embers across the floor until the
smoke billowed thick and clean. It caught straw
and flared up. By the new light he saw that, where
the heart of the fire had been, the earth was not
packed flat, but friable, as if newly dug.

He looked up at the grandmother, his eyes
squeezed against the smoke. Suspicion filled him
where before had been only resistance. 'What are
you protecting?'

'Nothing of yours.'

'Of course not. None of this is mine, is it? None
of it has been about me.' The truth, so obvious
once revealed, destroyed the last shreds of his
pride. 'I should have known you would only call
on your gods to protect your own, not to seduce
an enemy.' Resentment needled him into action
where fear had not. He used her skinning knife to
push aside more of the fire. The earth beneath was
not as newly turned as he might have thought, but
lines clearly showed where a hole had been dug. If
he had to guess, he would have said it had been
done four years before, at the time of the invasion,
when an emperor came to Cunobelin's dun and
was welcomed by the treachery of an elder - a
man who might have betrayed his gods and his
people but who would never enter this one place
from which he had always been forbidden.
Valerius, who believed he had lost the last of his
scruples, stabbed into the centre of the hearth and
heard the knife hit iron.

'Leave it! What harm it has done you is past.
Leave it and go!'

The old woman was clawing at his arm, her
fingers bird-boned to go with her bright, sharp
eyes. He grasped both of her wrists in one hand
and held her at arm's length. With his other
hand, he began to unearth the linen-wrapped
blade the fire had hidden. It was longer and
broader than any that had yet been broken on the
smith's anvil. When he grasped the hilt, the power
of it raked like lightning up his arm, close to the
threshold of bearing. The pain was cleansing, as
the brand had been.

Speaking through it, Valerius said, 'You offered
me a choice that was no choice. My path was set
long ago and not one step of it has been of my
choosing. I take now what life I can and make the
best of it, the very best. If there is a curse, then it
came in childhood at Caradoc's hand. I cannot
escape it.' It hurt even to speak the man's name
aloud. He gave it as an offering to the dark an did not know why he did so.

She said, 'It was not Caradoc branded you or
killed your soul-friend. Was the brother's death
not vengeance enough?'

One other living man in all the world knew how
Caradoc's brother had died and he was not of
the tribes. Swallowing, Valerius said, 'Amminios
did not pretend friendship and then betray it.'

Scathing, she said, 'And so you take vengeance
against those whom you do not know, in order
better to attack the one whom you can never
reach?'

The blade lay across his knees, liquid in the firelight.
The hilt was bronze, of the oldest design,
and the pommel bore the mark of the sun hound,
carved in the time of his great-grandfather. In a
wash of recognition that assuaged all the hurt, he
knew exactly whose blade it was and why they had valued it so highly, risking everything on its
protection. Joy, or something close to it,
enwreathed him. His blood ran thin in his veins,
leaping at his temples. He said, 'I take no
vengeance. I carry out the orders of those who
command me. That is enough.'

'Then let it be enough. You are cursed, Julius
Valerius, creature of the bull-slayer, servant of
Rome, cursed in the names of the gods you have
forsaken to live barren and empty, to know neither
true fear, nor love, neither joy nor human
companionship, but only the dull reflection of
these; to kill without care, to hold the dying without
grief, to find no satisfaction in the pure
moments of your hate, to live only to carry out the
orders of those who command you and to dream
at night of what you have lost. The gods know
you deserve it. They alone will know if it can end.'

She was shrill in her anger, old-woman-voiced,
no longer the mouthpiece of the gods, but Valerius
held the blade of Cassivellaunos, ancestor to
Cunobelin, forerunner in lineage and in heart to
the man he most hated of all those still living. He
could have asked for no greater gift. The joy had
run out of him, leaving him clear as a blown reed.

He cocked his head as the grandmother had
done. 'Do you wish to die by this blade, or
another?' he asked.

She spat at him. Gobbets of phlegm sat proud
on his cheeks. At his feet, embers of the swept fire
smoked in the straw. Flames devoured it.

Valerius had control of himself now, had no
need of further vengeance. Reasonably, he said, 'If
you walk out, they will hang you for fear of
who you are and what you might do. If I leave you
in here, they will let this place burn and you will
die by the fire. If either of those is your choice, I
will honour it. I am offering you a cleaner death.'

'Fool.' She whispered now. He could barely see
her through the smoke. 'Do you as you wish. I am
already dead.'

It was not true, although he made it so, using
the blade of Cassivellaunos, who had once
surrendered to Caesar, laying another man's blade
at his feet. The grandmother died without resistance
or sound. He laid her on her left side 'on a bed
of straw with her head towards the west. 'Go to
your gods. Tell them I serve another now and am
content.' He believed it. He had rarely felt so calm.
The flames were eating her feet when he left.

Outside, it had begun to snow again, the gift of
one god or the other to cover the destruction. The
body of the gold-haired warrior had been cut
down and laid on the pile of the burning shields;
fragments of greasy smoke fluttered up past falling
flakes. A warrior among the women saw the man
leave the hut and what he carried and raised a cry
that was keener and carried more pain than the
ululation for the dead. In a cacophony of women's
voices, Valerius walked forward and offered the
blade to Regulus.

'This belonged to Cassivellaunos, ancestor to
Caradoc, who leads the uprising in the west. They
have kept this blade in the hope that the last living
son of Cunobelin will return and lead them to
freedom. Longinus Sdapeze is both armourer and
master of horse for his troop. His father was a
smith. He will be able to break it. I thought you
might like to see it happen.'

VII.

The snow continued, fitfully. Beneath its shroud, the disarming of the tribes progressed. Troops rode out fresh each morning and returned each evening smoke-stained and bloody. Word of the events of
that first day spread amongst the natives and the men alike and all pretence at courtesy vanished.
Roundhouses were stripped and searched. Within three days, the second of the women's places hadburned to the ground and the hidden weapons
had been raked from the ashes as puddles of
waxen iron.

Soon, the killings began. In one steading, where
armed warriors had been waiting for the
auxiliaries and killed three before the troops
retreated and called in aid, every adult male was hanged. The women were spared; to have hanged them would have been to acknowledge their status
as warriors and if Scapula was not ready to do
that, then neither were his subordinates. News of
the savagery of the reprisals spread but did not
stop others from rebelling. In places where fear
constrained the adults, the children staged their
own revolts, hurling rocks and sticks at the
auxiliaries. Always it was the youths near to their
warrior's tests who broke first, those who had
grown in a free land, who had dreamed from
infanthood of becoming heroes and wielding the
blades of their ancestors and could not bear to
watch both hopes and blades destroyed. Orders
had been given that children were not to be
harmed, but the line was fine and both sides knew
that it was only a matter of time.

In the middle of the month, after a fifth trooper
had died to a grief-stricken warrior, Scapula
ordered that the executed natives should be denied
their burial rites and their bodies hung instead
outside the steadings as a warning. Neither he nor
any of the officers specified the height at which
they should be suspended and the auxiliaries,
acting in haste, did not hoist them high, so that,
by the old moon, wolves from the forest had
migrated into the pastures, seeking easy meat.
Soon, places which had been safe became unsafe
and four men of every troop spent each night
protecting the horse paddocks where the remounts
grazed. The troops grew impatient and edgy.
Roundhouses began to burn as well as the
women's places. Smoke rose to the sullen sky and
gathered there. Breathing became a chore.

Valerius' rank exempted him from night watch
on the paddocks but it did not free him from
responsibility, nor smooth his sleep. On his return
from the raid on Heffydd's farmstead, with the
grandmother's curse loud in his ears, he had gone
alone to the consecrated cellar beneath the
centurion's house in Camulodunum and had spent
the hours of darkness alone in prayer. It had not
been a quiet night and at no time had he felt the
true breath of the god, but he had believed afterwards
that he had been heard. At the very least,
Mithras kept the many and multiplying dead from
invading Valerius' dreams. Mithras' powers did
not extend, apparently, to keeping at bay the
recurring faces of the living: of a dark-haired girl
with a rock in her hand; of her mother, pulling
her back; of the endless storming sea of women
staring their accusations and their hatred.

Nor could it remove the constant flicker in
his arm, as of lightning, that had come from
Cassivellaunos' sword. The grandmother had been
right in that much: the blade had sung to him and
what was left of his soul sang back its regret that
the song had been broken and would never return.
Each night, lying awake, he remembered the
grandmother's curse and did not know if
he should welcome the death-within-life that it
promised or fight against it. Either way, by the end
of the month, when the killing was at its height, he
was too short on sleep to care.

He took to walking the perimeter of the horse
paddocks alone, armed only with his belt knife. It
became his offering and his open challenge to the
god. I am here, poorly armed and vulnerable.
Protect me if you can.

He walked as if blindfold. Distant fires flared
scarlet on the horizon. If he looked at them they
left a cast in his eyes so that the night around
seemed darker after. The sentries' torches offered
unreliable light, prone to moving just when one
needed them most, or simply to burning out. In
the absolute dark, Valerius came intimately to
know the shadows of the hedgerow and the shapes
of standing horses and he could name each one by
its outline seen against the grass, without moonlight
or starlight, simply black on black. Thus,
even on the night of the old moon, a month after the first disarming, when the clouds pressed down
on the earth, bleeding grey mist over the red blur
of the shield-fires, he knew that the shadow in the
third paddock was not that of the Thracian
decurion's second mount, alone, but that a man
stood beside it.

Drawing his knife, he crouched in the lee of the
hedge. The horse was a narrow-boned chestnut
gelding; not a mount he would have chosen, but
reliable in its way, and it knew him. He pursed his
lips and made a hushing noise, like the soft sliding
of snow. The beast turned its head and shuffled
forwards, too idle to raise a trot. The man-shadow
walked at its side, one hand gripping the mane,
pacing its footfalls to that of the beast.

just beyond killing range, it spoke. 'If you kill
me, the first turma of the Prima Thracum loses its
master of horse. Do you want that?'

'Longinus Sdapeze.' Valerius stood up slowly.
The knife stayed in his hand. 'Why are you here?

'Tonight, I prefer the company of horses to that
of men.' The man took a step sideways and the
outline of the gelding divided and became two.
Like Valerius, the Thracian chose to walk
unarmed and unarmoured. In the dark, still
beyond reach of the knife, he saluted, a thing he
rarely did these days.

Too formally, he said, 'I did not come to disturb
your travels. There are paddocks enough for both
of us. We need only walk in opposite directions.'

'Thank you. In a moment.' Valerius sheathed his
knife. It was a plain one, drawn from the armoury.
The hilt was of elm and the pommel of unadorned
iron printed with the Capricorn. He had not yet
grown used to the feel of it. He kept the heel of his hand on the hilt and rubbed his thumb over the wood. 'I heard your decurion hanged a pregnant
girl today. Is it true?'

'Yes. I'm amazed only that you heard of it. Amongst all the carnage, I would not have
thought the death of one more would reach the ears of Valerius. Unless, like the native dreamers, he knows everything?'

Longinus sounded sour and weary, and angry with himself as much as others. Valerius stepped
beyond the shade of the hedge and walked down, as the other must, towards the gap in the hedg
where a man could squeeze through but not a horse. As they met, he said, 'I know only what men tell me - that your troop entered northern
Eceni territory and they met - or created - resistance;
that of the thirty-two men who rode out,
only eight came back alive and that you were one
of them.' Valerius had not asked that, but the man
who gave him the information had found it
necessary to tell him- so repeatedly, as if he might care. 'I know that the decurion who gave the order
for the execution was one of the first killed, and
that you were injured, but not fatally. I wonder, in
all of this ... carnage, that you mourn a dead
girl.'

'Do you? Then you know nothing of Thracian
honour. She was fifteen, maybe sixteen, not long
into womanhood. She had the warrior's braids,
but no kill-feathers. They had killed her lover
whose child she carried and she stood over his
body as a hound protects the one it loves. It took
three men to overwhelm her and one of those died.
The decurion ordered her hanged with the
warriors. She was pregnant, Valerius, and it made
no difference.'

The first woman, the first child. A barrier
broken. If Valerius were not so hellish tired, either
or both of these might matter more. 'Was it that
sparked the violence?'

'Yes. The people would not stand and see her
die. Were she mine, I would have killed for her,
also.' Longinus spat. 'Romans! They think women
and children are fit sacrifices in war and anything
less than crucifixion smacks of leniency. And they
call us barbarians.'

You would as well crucify their children.

It may come to that.

The night was thick with fog and frost and
unspent dreams. Valerius stared into nothing and waited for anger, or regret, or an understanding
of the pain, for the reality of Eceni deaths to
overwhelm him. Nothing came but weariness and
visions of worse to come. In a while, thinking not
of himself, he asked, 'Have you daughters?'

'No.' It was said sharply, as if it were an insult
to ask. 'I have no children. But I have sisters and a
younger cousin who was born when I left to join
the legions. She would be eight years old now. For
any one of them, I would have fought as the Eceni did today, had I their courage. I doubt that I do.
They were unarmed; we had taken their swords
and broken them, destroyed their spears, burned their shields. They fought us with rocks and brands from the fire and when there was nothing else, they clawed at our faces with their bare
hands. And they killed us. If we had not got to our
horses and run, the eight of us would not still be
alive.'

Longinus rubbed his arm. Rumour reported a
burn wound that had cost him an evening in the
hospital awaiting treatment. He smelled lightly of
goose-grease, which would seem to confirm it.

'According to the decurion, Prasutagos, their
leader, was supposed to have sworn fealty to Claudius and been made client king for it. We were told the man was the glove into which
Scapula inserted his hand and that, at the governor's request, he would deliver his people
without conflict. I think the "king" forgot to tell
his warriors.'

The king. Never in their history had the Eceni
accepted the rule of a king and Prasutagos was not
made of kingly stuff. In races, on foot or on horse,
he had always come second. In boar-hunts, he was
behind the hounds and his spear was always
lodged in the chest of a dying beast, never the first
one to strike. In war ... It was impossible to
remember how Prasutagos had been in war. He
might have acquitted himself well once, but he had
lost an arm in doing so and, if the governor were to
be believed, the defect left him sour and weak-willed
and easily bought by wine and gold. It was hard to
imagine Eceni pride taking orders from such a man
as that.

'It may be the king instructed his warriors and
they chose not to listen,' Valerius said. 'The Eceni
have never taken orders from just one individual.
Their grandmothers rule their councils and the
dreamers rule the grandmothers. It would be a
mistake to expect too much of 'Tagos merely
because he bows to Rome. He may have gold
enough to buy those who care for it, but that
doesn't mean they will listen to him if their
dreamers or their own instincts tell them
otherwise.'

'Their instincts run to war now, and I don't
blame them.'

As if each had decided it alone, they walked
together down towards the river. Valerius said,
'Do you regret your place in this?'
Longinus' face was a blur in the dark. 'I would
rather he on this side than the other, but yes, I would rather be in the west where they have open,
honest warfare than in this mess of pretended
peace.'

'We are on the verge of open war here as well.
It may be that it has already started. Listen.'
Valerius had heard the noise when they left the
field, but not been sure of its source. Closer to
the river, he heard it clearly: the sound of a horse
pushed to its limits, stumbling in the dark over
snow-hidden ground. 'What would make a man
ride that hard at night?'

Longinus said, 'He's under attack?'

'Or his post is. There is a fort in the territory of
the northern Eceni. I will bet you a decent salve for
your arm against the return of my falcon-headed
dagger that the Eceni have risen, that the fort is a
heap of burning beams and that we are sent north
to stamp out the rebellion.' Valerius turned to
Longinus. In a world of many fears, his worst was
now realized. As with many things, it was not as
bad as he had thought it might be. The grandmother's
curse had dulled the edge of his fear. To
that extent, it was good. Smiling, he said, 'Unless
you have already lost the dagger to someone else
and can't give it back?'

Five days later, in the lime-washed peace of the
hospital, the falcon-headed dagger was returned to him. Valerius sat on the edge of Longinus' bed,
turning it over in his hands. The blade was broken
near the tip, leaving a jagged end. The god Horus
had taken a dent in the back of the head, loosening
one of his eyes.

'It's your fault. Your mad bloody horse trod on
it.' Longinus smiled with the half of his face that
was not a fulgent, greening bruise. Pain showed in
the creases beside his eyes.

Valerius slid the blade back into its sheath. He
was exhausted beyond anything he could ever
remember. Not even the two days' battle of the
invasion had left him this worn. He said, 'Next
time I'll remember to stop and pick up the dagger
before the man.'

'And leave me to your barbarians with their
witch-carvings?'

'No. I would take a hammer to your head
before I left you to that.'

'Thank you.'

They made a joke of it to cover their fear, but
each knew the other was serious. Valerius had
killed two men with his lump hammer, neither
soon enough. Having been reminded, it was
impossible to think of anything else.
Longinus said, 'Did you know the first one was
there when you rode up the column?'

'Of course not. How could I? I just knew we
were walking into an ambush. I wanted to say
something to Corvus before the governor's bloody
infantry got us all killed.'

It was not strictly speaking Scapula's infantry,
but that of Marcus Ostorius, his son, and in
that young man's pride, and his presence, lay the
fault for a great many deaths and grievous
injuries.

The problem had been one of protocol. Scapula
had ordered his son, the tribune of the Legio
Secunda Augusta, to remain in the east while the
reinforcements marched west to the aid of his
legion. It was his right and any father's duty to
protect his son from the ravages of the western
war, but the boy chafed in the harness, desperate
to fight, and anyone with half an eye could see it.
When the officers had met to determine their
response to the uprising among the Eceni, Marcus
Ostorius had first offered to lead the full cohort of
the XXth legion on a forced march into the native strongholds. It is not easy to gainsay a tribune, still
less a governor's son who lays his pride so openly
on the table. The discussions that followed had been unusually diplomatic. In the end, it had been unanimously agreed that Marcus Ostorius would take two centuries of the legion to assail the Eceni,
leaving the remainder to guard the fortress against the possibility of an uprising among the Trinovantes. The two wings of cavalry, one thousand men in all, had been detailed as 'escort'  for his one hundred and sixty legionaries.

Thus had the disaster unfolded. The cavalry had
been forced to ride at the pace of marching men
and so a journey that had taken a terrified rider
less than half the night, took the returning units
nearly two days. It was dawn on the second day
before they reached the smoking skeleton of the fort that had been attacked. Roman deaths must
not go unmarked and so Marcus Ostorius had
ordered that they burn the remains to the ground
in honour of those who had given their lives in its
defence. In the heart of enemy territory a thousand
battle-ready men had spent a morning gathering
firewood, jumping at shadows and untoward
noises, until an entire tent-party of eight legionaries
had been injured by their own comrades in a
mistaken confrontation and had to be sent back to
the fortress under the care of a half-dozen
troopers. With their numbers thus reduced, those
left had piled the wood around the base of the fort
and lit it. The blaze of their labours threw flames
to the tops of the highest trees and did nothing to
make them feel safer.

Loyal Trinovantian scouts had been sent out
when the fort was first found, and two of five
returned to the pyre with news of Eceni warriors
massing to the north-west. The track along which
they guided the troops that afternoon was no
more than two horses wide and led into thicker
forest than any they had so far passed. Mounted
again, the cavalry rode in battle formation with
their swords unsheathed and their shields ready
on their arms, but at walking pace so as not to
outrun the infantry who accompanied them. A
man could have grown tired of waiting if he stood
in one place for the length of time it took the
entire column to pass. A different man could see it
as a gift from his gods in the planning of an
ambush.

Valerius rode at the rear of his troop with
Sabinius at his side. It was Corvus' battle plan and
both wings adhered to it: the second in command
of each troop rode last in the column so that, if the
snake were to have its head cut off in ambush,
the tail could yet turn and bare its fangs at the
enemy, led by an officer with some experience
of command. Valerius had no experience of
command in combat, but he had three years'
practice at giving orders and had listened often
enough to Corvus' descriptions of battles past to
trust his own judgement. His judgement now told
him that he was riding into an ambush and that
nothing he could do would stop it.

To Sabinius, Valerius said, 'If we are attacked
from the sides, get off your horse and put your
back to mine. Keep your horse on your shield side
as protection and be ready to mount and ride
south for safety if I am killed. Someone should
survive to get word to the governor; it may as well
be you.'

'You have thought of this already?' 

'Before we ever left the fort.'

Soon after, a command from the tribune halted
the column and Valerius was called to the front.
He smelled the blood and the void urine as he
cantered to the head of the line, a common enough
smell in the past month, but not here where the
disarming had not yet begun. The sound of retching
and the acidity of vomit reached him as he
approached the first ranks.

The leading officers were gathered at the
margins of a small clearing in the centre of which
an ancient yew spread boughs over black loam;
neither snow nor sun penetrated here. Dismounting,
Valerius noticed first that Corvus had
used his dagger, that its hilt and his right arm were
stickily black. With the care of habit, he noted that
Corvus had not been sick, but was close to it;
that he had not wanted to call on Valerius but had
been forced to by circumstances or the order of the
tribune; and that already he regretted it.

Only after that did Valerius look beyond to see
what the milling horses had hidden. The body of
a naked man hung suspended by one heel from a
bough. It turned slowly, back and forth, spun by
a non-existent wind. Flaps of skin had been flayed
from the back and hung down like wings. At
the front, black blood had flowed down from the
mutilated groin to drip onto the earth beneath.
The throat had been cut some time after the
genitals and all that was left of the man's blood
had flooded out onto the hungry loam. It was
impossible to see the face.

'One of the Trinovantes?' Valerius asked.

'Who else?' Corvus' lips were a pale, straight
line. 'There are markings carved on the chest. The
upper one is the running horse of the Eceni - the same as the one we saw on the walls of the burned
fort. The others are new. We have not seen them
now or during the invasion. It may help us if you
could identify them.'

The clearing was very still; in this place the gods
themselves held their breaths. The one god was
not present, this was not his domain. Feeling his
absence, Valerius walked up to the body. The
man's testes had been severed and stuffed into
the jaws, the just punishment for a man who aids
his enemies. Crouching, he found that the eyes had been gouged out and placed on the forest floor so
that one watched forward and one backward.
That, too, was just under tribal law; the man had
been a scout, he had sold his eyes to Rome and they
had been given back to the gods. Both were
submerged beneath the tide of fresh blood that had
spilled from the scout's severed throat. Touching it,
Valerius found his fingers slid wetly on his thumb;
here, there was no sign of clotting. The chill on his
neck became a stave of ice. Unwilling, he turned to
Corvus, who had recently used his knife.

'This is freshly spilled. Was he still alive when
you found him?'

'Yes.'

'God.' Always before, the men had been dead
before the cuts were made. Even in the invasion
when the anger of the tribes was at its height, the
throats had been cut, or the men had died in
combat and the mutilations had been visited on
them afterwards. The gods demanded just
penance, but they had never previously required a
man to suffer for it as this one had. The
Trinovantian scout had been gone half the morning
but his body hung less than a thousand paces
from the burning fort. None of his wounds was
fatal. Had the auxiliaries taken a different path, he
could have hung there, living, for the rest of the
day and into the night.

Valerius pressed a shuddering hand to his eyes
and waited until his guts settled. 'They're learning
from us,' he said. 'A slow death spreads fear to
those who have seen it happen.'

Only by the change in the quality of the silence
did he know he had spoken aloud.

Corvus said, 'The marks carved on his chest are
not the serpent-spear. We need to know what we
face.'

'And meanwhile half of the Eceni nation is
surrounding this clearing with intent to hang us all
by our heels.' Marcus Ostorius was nervous and
let it show, which did nothing to stiffen the
courage of his troops. 'We need to move quickly
while we have daylight and there is a chance we
can ride out of this accursed forest. Read the
markings and be done with it. We should not be
here.'

Valerius had already seen them. The understanding
of what they meant had churned at his
guts before the rest. With his eyes on Corvus, he
said, 'The mark beneath the horses is a fox. See,
here ...this single line flows from the nose to the
tail and here ...above the nose are the two ears
and beneath it the forepaws. Its position below the
running horse means it is the personal mark of
whoever's leading the warriors.'

'And who is that? Who has the fox as their
dreaming?'

'I don't know.' That was not entirely true. A
memory teased at the back of his mind but would
not come forward. Aware of Corvus' impatience,
Valerius shook his head. 'We'll find out soon
enough. If the fox is carved here with the horse of
the Eceni, it will be worn clearly in battle. When we
come upon the warriors - if we ever see any of them
before they kill us - this man will be easily seen.'

'Or this woman,' said the tribune sourly.

Their eyes met. Valerius nodded. 'Indeed.'

Marcus Ostorius turned on his heel and
mounted. The troops moved out in battle order,
each man ready to kill and be killed. The deepening
woods were god-filled and the gods were not
those of Rome or its allies. In the ranks, prayers
were offered to Jupiter, god of the legions, and to
Cernunnos, antlered forest-god of the Gauls. The
Thracians called on their own gods in their own
language. Valerius and those like him touched
their brands and renewed their oaths to Mithras,
bull-slayer and protector of his own.

By order of Marcus Ostorius, Valerius rode now
in front with the officers, the faster to read any
marks the natives had left. He passed beneath
trees whose branches sang to him in ancient,
ancestral tongues. His skin felt newly flayed, so
that every sound brushed against it. When Corvus,
riding close by, asked, 'What was the third sign?'
he jumped.

'The one beneath the fox? I'm not certain. It
was hard to read - the man struggled as they cut
it and the lines were not clear.'

Corvus had never allowed him evasion and did
not do so now. 'It seemed to me it was a bird,' he
said. 'A hawk.'

'it may well have been. The question is which
hawk? I think ... I am very much afraid that it
was the red kite.'

'And if it was?'

'Then the warriors of the Coritani and those of
the Eceni have put aside the enmity of seven
generations and are united against us.' Valerius
forced himself to smile and knew the effort was
seen. 'Be happy. The tribune desires a conflict to
match the one he is missing in the west. If we are
fighting the warriors of these two tribes combined,
he will have it.'

They rode apart after that and did not speak.
The remaining two lost scouts were found along
the way, one hanging like the first, the second
pegged out, face down in a marsh with a stone
keeping his head free of the water and the dreammarks
cut on his back. Valerius killed them both,
swinging his spiked lump hammer at the skull
between the eyes and a little above as he would
have done for a horse with colic. The deaths were
swift and merciful. In each case, they came half a
day too late.

The three bodies had been left at intervals along a clear route, as a hunter might leave hunks of
meat for a bear, luring it into a trap, and Valerius
had not been surprised when, shortly after the
pegged man, the spears had begun to fly from
the forest. If he had planned an ambush, he would
have done it there, where the path was narrowed to a single horse's breadth and the auxiliaries were trapped with dank, sucking marsh to one side and
dense forest the other, the trees too tightly spaced
for mounts or men to penetrate.

The infantry, being slower, caught the brunt of
the spears; it had been clear from the start that
they would. They linked their square-edged
shields edge to edge and crouched behind the wall
they made, but the spears arced high and fell down
from above and the wall broke in places leaving
gaps for other spears and men died like sheep at
slaughter.

For the first few moments of the attack, the
cavalry circled uselessly at the edges, losing horses
and men as fast as the infantry. They could not
penetrate the trees, nor could they protect the
crouching legionaries. At Marcus Ostorius'
express command, both wings pushed their horses
to a gallop and fled. The spears herded them like
deer towards the open space at the end of the
track. The infantry, led by centurions who had no
wish to see men die for the sake of it, picked up
their shields and ran after them. A little over one
hundred men survived to reach the clearing.

Bursting out of the forest at the head of his
troop, Valerius found himself in a stretch of more
open land, thinly scattered with oak and elm. To
his right, the marsh made a firm boundary as solid
as rock. Thick forest swept up to the left. In front,
blocking the broad space between marsh and
forest, a barrier of cut oak trunks had been
erected, high enough to shield men to their
shoulders and three hundred paces long. Behind
that, the massed warriors of two tribes waited. At
a conservative estimate, rapidly made, they
numbered at least three thousand. Flashes of
colour from cloaks, armbands and weapons
showed others in uncountable numbers packed in
the forest to the left and hedging the marsh to the
right. There were equal numbers of Coritani
amongst the Eceni, confirming the worst.

The auxiliaries should have fought on horseback.
For the rest of his life, Valerius believed that
if they had not dismounted, they could have won,
or at least lost fewer men, but Marcus Ostorius
was an infantry officer at heart and he had his
surviving half-century of infantry still to protect
and bring home alive. Thus the tribune had
signalled the dismount and, disbelieving, men who
had trained since childhood to fight on horseback
found themselves foot soldiers at the last.

Marcus Ostorius had read books on strategy,
had spent hours in educated argument with the
peers of his youth dissecting Scipio's actions
against Hannibal or Octavian's against Marcus
Antonius. Faced by an enemy in overwhelming
numbers stationed behind an unbreachable barrier
and lacking the necessary equipment for a siege,
he divided his men into two wings while he himself
planned to assault the centre with the
surviving men of his two centuries.

The Eceni laughed. Valerius heard them from
his place at Regulus' side on the left wing of the
supposed assault. As the auxiliaries turned
towards the forest at their flank, the insults rang
off the trees as if the waiting crows had learned the
tongues of men. Some of it was in Latin; most was
not. Of all those on the Roman side, only Valerius
and Corvus could possibly understand the full
measure of their enemy's derision, and perhaps
share it. Corvus led his men twenty paces to Valerius' left and twice refused to meet his eye; he
would die loyal to his superior officer, however
insane the command.

It was entirely insane. The Quinta Gallorum drew their swords early and used blades designed for slashing skin and flesh to hack through beech
fronds and entangling bramble instead. From the
start it was clear that, deeper in, the shields would become caught on undergrowth and would have to be tugged free or pushed forward to force a
space, leaving the man behind exposed to the
thrust of an Eceni spear.

Longinus' wing had the harder task: that of
negotiating a mere of unknown depth to come in
from the right against warriors who could see
them coming and pick them off at will. Marcus
Ostorius Scapula, true to his heritage, set himself
at the head of his remaining hundred legionaries. He had them raise their shields over their heads
that they might resist thrown rocks and spears and
then he led them, like some glorious ancient general, in charge after charge against a solid oak
barrier and three thousand waiting spears.

Valerius saw flashes of the carnage at the barrier
later in the ghastly, annihilating fight that
followed. Not even in the first fruitless battles of
the invasion had he seen so many men die for so
little effect. In the hateful lucidity of killing, it
came to him slowly that this was what the bird-eyed
grandmother had meant. You are cursed ...
to live barren and empty, to know neither true
fear, nor love, neither joy nor human companionship
... to kill without care ...Throughout the
battles of his past, terror and the need to live had
spurred him, and afterwards he had salved his
conscience with the excuse that he fought to
survive. Now, in his first true battle under the care
of Mithras, he had no conscience to salve. He
fought hand to hand with men and women whose
faces haunted his dreams and whose voices,
pitched for battle, had been the thrill and yearning
of his youth and he felt nothing. He crossed
swords with warriors who fought not only for
their honour and freedom but for vengeance
against an unspeakable wrong and he felt their
anger course over him while his own lay dormant.
He saw Regulus step into a trap set by four waiting
warriors who hacked the decurion's head from
his shoulders and he felt neither satisfaction nor
sorrow nor fear that he himself risked the same
death with each forward step.

The remnants of the Quinta Gallorum - less
than three-quarters of the wing - broke through
the trees not long after Regulus' death. The line
of the enemy fell back. More auxiliaries ran in
from the forest and were joined by wet-legged
Thracians sweeping in unopposed from the marsh.
The space behind the barrier, which had been
filled with mixed warriors of the Coritani and the
Eceni, was suddenly a place of polished mail and
helmets, of coloured plumes and white shield
discs. It felt like a victory and men who had seen
their lives lost felt them won again. Swords
clashed on shield hubs in exultant celebration and
Marcus Ostorius' name was raised as a chant that
spilled over the departing warriors as a wave spills
over flotsam on a beach.

From nowhere and for no good reason, Valerius
remembered a childhood tale of a fish-trap set by
a bear where spawning salmon had been lured up
into the pool behind a beaver's dam from which
the water was then diverted, leaving the fish as
easy pickings for the beast. It had been intended as
a tale for infants to teach them hunting but it
applied no less to adults at war. In his god-cursed
clarity, Valerius saw the flashing scales of
legionary armour swirling in bloody spirals over
the barrier - and then the tide of the warriors
returning to smash a small, poorly led force
caught with its back against solid wood with no
means of escape. Already the foremost warriors
had turned and were engaging the closest
auxiliaries.

'It's a trap!' Valerius shouted it to Corvus who
fought close by; he had never let him out of his
sight. 'Get back to the tribune! Tell him we've
swum into their trap.'

The warriors were engaging in ever greater
numbers. Hard pressed simply to live, Corvus
laughed. 'So find us a way to swim out at the other
end. There's no going back.'

There was no going forward, either, until
Valerius saw the mark of the fox. It was not
painted on the shield of a warrior as he had
expected but drawn instead in red ochre on the
brow of a singer above an encircling thong of
horse hide that marked one of highest rank. The
man wore a simple band of fox pelt around his
upper arm but was otherwise free of ornament. In a field of warriors who rode to war in a panoply
of enamelled gold, decked with kill-feathers and
all possible marks of dream and rank, this one was
remarkable for his austerity. Nevertheless, he had
command of the warriors and the flow of battle.
He stood apart from the fighting on a small rise
and a knot of blue-cloaked warriors gathered
close, both guarding him and waiting to relay his
orders to their peers. A small wind arose around
him, lifting his thin, red hair, and he turned a little, showing his profile.

'Dubornos!' The name had been itching half-formed at
Valerius' mind since they'd found the scout hanging
in the forest with the fox cut on his chest. He
hissed it to himself now and saw the man's head
come up as if he had called it aloud. The god did
enter Valerius then, despite the curse. He felt, not
blind courage or the passion of battle, but a mote
of undiluted joy, a spark in the endless night, a
gift of certainty that this one man, alone of all the
Eceni, he could kill without fear that his spirit
would return to haunt his sleep.

Raising his blade, he screamed, 'Here! The fox
is here! Kill him and we break the trap!' and
charged.

He should have died. In the red haze of battle,
fighting up a hill, he faced alone a wall of blue cloaks, interspersed with the green-striped Coritani, but then Umbricius and Sabinius were
on either side, fighting with him. Aeternus the
young Helvetian joined them, and his cousin, who
had been wounded and was quickly slain. They
fought together as four and were joined by
Longinus who brought others from the Thracian wing and the god smiled and they formed a line
with their big, oval shields locked at the edges and their swords hacking through the gaps exactly as
they had practised in the months of probation before they were admitted to the cavalry and like
this they could survive, could fight to win, could press forward over the bodies of dead and dying
warriors to reach - nothing.

In their unity, they had won the rise but the foxdreamer
had not stayed to meet them. Down the
gentle slope on the far side were set sharpened stakes, pointing upwards to deter men and horses alike, and the warriors had retreated beyond them, taking their singers. Beyond the fen was
forest into which none but warriors could safely,
or sanely, pass.

Valerius turned. Behind them, the fighting still raged at the oak barrier. The trap had been sprung, sending the warriors back to flood against the struggling legionaries and their unmounted auxiliary allies. Marcus Ostorius was there, a few
paces forward from the barrier, but going no
further. Close by, Corvus fought to reach him.
Blue- and green-cloaked warriors encircled them.
It did not seem likely that either man could live.

Valerius killed a woman warrior with coppery
hair and looked past her to find Longinus Sdapeze
on his shield side. The man was whole, but for a
bruise on his forehead where a head blow had
slammed his helmet onto his brow. Grinning
ferociously, he said, 'Two can lay traps like this.
We could come in at them from the back and
finish it. There are enough of us, almost.' He
raised his arm and howled in Thracian. A dozen
more men of his wing ran to join him.

Valerius shook his head. 'No. Count them - there are less than half of the Eceni down there.
Do you think the fox and his warriors have fled? I
don't. The moment we are fully engaged, when it
would be death to turn our backs, they will come
in again and we will be caught between two forces
and crushed.'

'Then what do we do?'

'We get to the mounts and fight on horseback as
we should have done at the start. It's our only
hope.'

Longinus laughed. 'It may be your hope, but not
ours. Not all of us ride man-killers. My mare is
good, but she'd never come in here.' He raised his
hand, palm out, in the cavalryman's salute. 'You
get the horses. They'll follow you and your pied
brute. I'll take whoever will follow me and see if
we can't reach the tribune. The governor won't
thank us if we don't at least return to him the body
of his son.'

Valerius grinned and returned the salute. 'Make
sure the golden boy's face isn't marked when they
kill him. You have to be certain the body's still
pleasing to look at.'

Neither of them expected to live. In war, men
will do things that later are manifest madness and
feel them sane at the time. There were no warriors
between the salmon-trap and the woods where the
horses stood. Valerius threw his shield to a
Thracian auxiliary, whose need of it was greater
than his, and ran.

The cavalry mounts had been left in the care of
a dozen Gauls, who were dead. The horses themselves had not been touched; the Eceni valued
good mounts above anything else living besides
their children and would not harm horses who
could bring good blood to their herds. No
warriors waited near them, seeing no need. The
horses were battle trained; they stood by
the bodies of the last men to command them and
would continue to do so unless summoned by a
voice they knew. Valerius' voice was known. He
found himself alone in the open space between
trees and marsh and saw the Crow-horse raise its
head to look at him. Retching from the run, with
the iron taste of blood in his spit, he put his fingers
to his mouth and whistled.

As Longinus had said they would, the herd
followed their leader. The Crow came at the gallop, and two wings of horses followed behind. They
might have stopped if he had asked it of them but
he could not be sure and, in any case, Valerius had
his pride; the grandmother's curse had not robbed
him of that. The mount by an armed and
armoured man of a running horse was a feat
celebrated by cavalry and warriors alike and all of
them, however preoccupied with death and
survival, had heard the churning roll of massed
horses at the gallop. In full view of his god, his enemies and those who might have been
his friends, Julius Valerius, duplicarius of the third
troop, Fifth Gaulish Cavalry, servant of Mithras
and of the emperor, executed a near-perfect
cavalry mount on a running horse ahead of a herd
that would have crushed him to pulp if he had
failed and fallen beneath them. Afterwards, he thought it would have looked better if he had not
thrown away his shield.

Only Longinus knew what he planned to do.
The Thracian screamed himself hoarse clearing
men back from the barrier. To do that, they had
either to press forward, making space, or to duck out sideways into mere or forest. Men did all three
and many of them died. Those who survived
watched their duplicarius face his pied horse at a jump that reached the height of its stifle with no
clear view beyond and saw the horse gather itself
and leap. Three dozen of the closest horses in the
herd followed him, before the bulk of them balked
at the height of the barrier and turned away.

Valerius, riding high over the battle in what
should have been a crowning moment, tasted the
dust and ashes of failure and knew once again that his god had abandoned him. Seeking solace in the
approval of men, he saw the moment when
Longinus was struck on the arm by the backswing
of a Coritani blade. He shouted and the one man left whole on the battlefield who recognized his
voice heard him and turned; and so Corvus, who
had fought his way through to his tribune and gained a clear space around him, was struck from behind by a spear and then a blade.

It was then that Valerius, howling Eceni war
cries, gave up all pretence of being a man and let the unbridled savagery of the Crow-horse run wild. Man and horse killed together, endlessly. At
least one of them enjoyed it.

In the cool, well-lit hospital, insulated from the
aftermath of battle, Valerius said calmly, 'Did you
know they have awarded Marcus Ostorius the
oak-wreath for saving the life of a fellow citizen?'
It was the highest order of personal valour any
man could win. Longinus' eyes stretched wide.
'Who did he save? Not one of the legionaries they were all dead, and I'm not a citizen so I don't count. Corvus then? The tribune saved Corvus? I thought I saw him go down.'

'You did. He took a sword cut to the back just
before you ran into the Coritani shield boss that
knocked you out. When the horses pushed the
Eceni back, Marcus Ostorius carried him out
beyond the harrier and we brought him back on a litter. You would have got the same but you were
delirious and wouldn't get down from my horse.'

Longinus grinned. It creased the bruised half of
his face and the cost showed. 'I wasn't going to
give up the only chance in my life to ride him, even
if you were holding me crossways in front of the
saddle.' He shook his head, at himself or the
memory, and stopped smiling. He reached out for
Valerius' hand and gripped it. His palm was
clammy and cold. In a while, when it was warmer,
he said, 'Why are you here and not with him?'

He asked it too casually; they knew each other
too well for that not to be seen. Valerius thought
a moment and gave him the truth. 'The tribune
has forbidden him visitors. In any case, I don't
think Corvus wants--'

He looked down. Longinus had pressed the
falcon-headed dagger back into his palm. Shaking
his head as if to one of slow wits, the Thracian
said, 'Go and see him. If nothing else, he needs to
know what you did. Tell Theophilus you are
necessary to his recovery. He'll support you, and a
tribune can't overrule a physician in the practice of
his craft.'

VIII.

Valerius waited for a long time in the corridor outside
the door. The hospital was arranged in
concentric squares around a main courtyard; the
windows of the most secluded rooms faced
inwards, away from the cacophony of the fortress.
The walls were lime-washed with the insignia of
the legions and wings; the Capricorn, the Boar, the
Pegasus, painted in subdued colours at intervals
along their length. The air smelled cleanly of cut
sage and rosemary: the sweet undertones of festering
flesh were confined to the areas around the
few rooms where men were clearly dying.

Valerius stood outside a door on which the Eye
of Horus had been newly painted in blue and
breathed in air spiked with lemon balm and a
light, peppery incense and the smell of a man he
would know with his eyes closed.

He had tried twice to enter but neither time with
any conviction. It was, he knew, his own failure of
nerve more than Marcus Ostorius' orders that had
prompted the doctor to turn him back. In the few
days since the battle, Valerius had found he could
dissect his own motives as cleanly and with as
little passion as he judged others. Standing on the
wrong side of a closed door, he knew that he did
not want to see the extent of Corvus' injuries, to
find if a body that had once revelled in its battle-scarred wholeness was crippled beyond repair, as
had seemed likely when they had brought him out
over the barrier. Deeper than that, Valerius was
afraid that a different, less material door that had
always been open had finally been closed. If so, it
had closed before the battle and nothing that had
happened since would open it.

The first sign of that closing had come in the
chaos of arming men as they gathered to depart
for the Eceni fort. Men and horses had milled in semi-organized chaos in the annexe where the
army gathered before departure. Valerius had been
ordering the horses of his troop when Corvus called him to his side.

They had ridden knee to knee, a little away
from the wing. Corvus rode his remount, a red
roan mare with all four legs white to mid-pastern
and striped hooves. She was finely bred and outclassed most of the rest of the wing but she was
not the horse who had borne him through the
invasion battles and should have borne him
through this; that was a bay mare of Pannonian
descent and Corvus had loaned her, possibly given
her - who can ask for a loan back from a governor's son? - to Marcus Ostorius.

Valerius noted it with raised brows. To another
man, the gesture could have meant anything. To
Corvus, it asked questions and answered them all
in one movement. 'If he is to fight the Eceni and live, he needs a decent horse.'

Valerius smiled tightly. 'The Ala Quinta Gallorum has some excellent horses. You did not have to give him yours.'

'You would rather I gave him your pied mankiller?'

'The governor would hang you for attempted
murder did you even suggest it.'

'So instead, he has mine, which will not kill him and may, instead, keep him alive.' 

'And does he know that his horse is his nursemaid, as well as his prefect?'

He had always been able to read Corvus'
moods. This time, as ever before, he sensed
the change before he saw it. As never before, the understanding came as a blow to the chest that
knocked his heart from its rhythm.

Anger burned in the prefect's eyes. With quiet
force, he said, 'If you say that again or anything like it, I will have you flogged and demoted to the ranks. Do you understand me?'

In eight years, however they might have fought,
Corvus had not used his rank as a weapon. Feeling
the skin tighten to parchment on his skull, Valerius
said, 'Perfectly.' 
You  will know neither love nor joy ... The

curse had not debarred him from feeling the withdrawal
of love, nor from mourning its loss. He
had imagined it a thing for ever, as certain as the
rising and setting of the moon, something solid he
could rail against in safety and return to later,
when the rage had burned out. Shock left him hollow and weightless. He fought to listen, to
mark Corvus' words and their meanings, inner
and outer.

Corvus said, 'Good. Then listen and consider your answer carefully. As you may know, the client king Prasutagos now lays claim to rulership of the Eceni. He does so through a woman named
Silla who professes the royal line. She has borne
her "king" two stillborn sons and may yet present
him with a living child to act as his successor.'

He paused, waiting for a response. None came.
The world of fortress gossip had long since
brought Valerius news of 'Tagos' kingship, but not
the reason for his elevation. Men raised in a world
of men had thought wine and gold enough to buy status. Valerius, raised differently, should have
seen the truth, but had not. In his mind, Silla was
too young to take any man; she was three years
old and sharing his bed, clinging like a limpet for
warmth because, even in the height of summer, she
could not bear the aloneness of lying apart. She was six, lying on the turf outside a forge,
watching her father make a sword that would one
day hear the serpent-spear on its pommel. She had
no interest in swords, and so, instead, she watched a late wasp land on a leaf and tried to grasp it. Her
brother brought her the crushed comfrey leaves to take the ache out of the sting. She was eight, kneeling in mud with her arms tight round the neck of
a hound, holding the beast back so that he would
not run after the riders on their way to
Cunobelin's dun. Her voice reached out across years, high and childlike: Don't be gone more than a month. He'll stop eating and die without you. Her dress was the green of old oak leaves, just before the turn. It had a border of bright saffron yellow along the hem. The memory of it stayed as an afterglow in Valerius' mind.

He had been gone a lifetime. The hound might well have stopped eating and died. Silla had borne two sons to 'Tagos and both were dead. Her
daughters, if she had any, would not be counted by
Rome.

Corvus was speaking again. '... which means
we will pass through his lands on our way to the
fort and the king will undoubtedly wish to offer us
hospitality. It seemed to me that you may wish not
to meet this man or any of his near kin. If this is
the case, it may be that there are reasons you
would be required to remain at the fortress. There
is still time to find a temporary replacement as
second in command of the third troop.'

'You could have me flogged, you mean, and I would have to stay behind?'

Valerius had meant it as a joke, of sorts, a
means to break through the formality. Corvus
nodded, as if the possibility were real. 'If you like,
although I had considered something more
certain. Were you to be flogged now, I suspect the
governor would still require you to ride out at
noon.

'I'm sure he would. I'm grateful, but if the
prefect permits, I would prefer to ride with a
whole skin.'

'But you are certain you wish to ride?'

'I am.'

They had reached the south gates of the fortress.
Valerius turned the Crow-horse away. He was
tired, suddenly, of word games. In the past, they
had not been necessary. In the future, perhaps
they would not be possible, replaced by the distant
formalities of rank. It was not a concept he wished
to consider in depth. He said, 'It was a good
thought and I am genuinely grateful, but there is
no need. 'Tagos may know you when you meet.
He will not recognize me.'

Corvus caught at his bridle. Alone of all other
men he could handle the Crow-horse without risking
his arm. Baldly, he said, 'And if the warriors
we fight bear the mark of the serpent-spear on
their shields, or if they are led by the redheaded
woman whose mark it is, what then?'

The wind whistled between them, raising the
hairs on their arms. In four years, neither of them
had mentioned the existence of the serpent-spear
or of the woman whose mark it was. That Corvus
did so now marked either his desperation, or the
utter diminution of his care.

Against a rising panic, Valerius said, 'The
warrior who bears the serpent-spear is not here.
You heard the tribune. She's in the west, leading the uprising with Caradoc.'

Corvus shook his head. 'That was over a month ago. Marcus Ostorius has ridden across the land
since then, and Breaca has had time to do so also.
If I were your sister, I would be raising resistance in the east. If she and Caradoc take us on two fronts, they can beat us.'

Valerius felt his worlds collide, as they had not done since before the invasion. He closed his eyes and sought his god, who did not come. The brand
lay cold on his chest. A grandmother cursed him,
laughing.


I had no choice. I have none now.

Fool.

Thickly, he said, 'I will do as you will do and for the same reasons. I am committed to the legions, I
have taken the oath before the emperor and another before the god. Whoever we meet, however we meet them, I will follow orders and I will fight.'

'And if you are ordered to crucify their
children?'

The pied horse flung up its head, and the bridle
ripped from Corvus' hand. Biting hard on his own
lip, Julius Valerius, duplicarius of the third troop of the Ala Quinta Gallorum, saluted his prefect
with rigid precision. 'Then I will follow your lead,
in that as in everything.'

It had been a parting of the worst kind and nothing that had happened since had improved it.

They had, indeed, spent a night under Prasutagos'
care and the client king had not known either of them. In truth, there had been little risk that he
would; the conversation had been of other, deeper
things. More, it had marked the ending of something
neither had believed would ever end.

Valerius stood now in the hospital corridor
outside a room that smelled of lemon balm and
knew that he did not have the courage to open the
door.

'The hero of the battle. You didn't tell me that
last time. I wondered how long before you came
back again.'

Valerius spun on his heel. Theophilus, the lean
and long-nosed doctor, leaned against a wall
behind him. Once, he had ministered to an
emperor but then the emperor had changed and it
was no longer politic for members of the old court
to remain in Rome. He had fled to Germany and
found a home amongst the legions on the Rhine, travelling with them to the new province of
Britannia as part of the invading army. Since then,
he had become sole medic to an entire fortress,
alternately tending to men sick with fever and those wounded in combat. It was hard to tell if he
was happier when men came back injured from
battle or whole.

He regarded Valerius from under white brows.
Like the dreamers of the tribes, Theophilus knew
the secrets of a man's heart.

Valerius said, 'I was leaving. I would not disturb him.'

'No, but perhaps he would disturb you.'
Theophilus never spoke without need and always
with words beneath the words. A new caduceus in
gold glittered at his breast; a gift from the governor.
Beneath it, his old one, carved in apple wood, hung
from a leather thong. He touched this one with his
thumb in the same way Valerius touched his brand.
'The tribune is with him. Did you know?'

'I guessed. Even were he not, it is not my place
to visit. I will leave and'

'No. Don't go.' The door swung back. The scent
of citrus oils flooded out, and stale blood beneath.
Marcus Ostorius Scapula, resplendent in white
and scarlet, stood on the threshold. If they had
made him emperor and dressed him in purple, he
could not have looked more regal. He turned the
full weight of his black gaze on Valerius and
smiled, beautifully. 'Duplicarius, come in. The
prefect would be happy to see you.'

It was an order, disguised as an offer, and could
not be denied, however much one might wish so to
do. Inside, the room was quiet, the breathing of
the man on the bed so shallow as barely to
disturb the air. Corvus lay flat, white as the linen.
Part of his scalp had been shaved, the better to
treat the wound on his head. His chest was bound
round with bandages. His right arm lay limply on the sheets, waiting for something with more will than he currently possessed to move it.

The door closed and the tribune was on the
inside. The duplicarius was not to be left alone
with his prefect. Valerius stood to attention at the
foot of the bed. Corvus' gaze swept over him and
came back, too complex to read. He fought,
openly, for composure and found it; against what
pain could not be known.

'Julius Valerius . . .' Words cost the prefect
breath and breath, clearly, was pain. Valerius
settled himself to patience.

The governor's son was less patient. He said,
'You will know that the weather has improved and
a ship has docked south of the fortress. It brings a
message from the emperor commending the
governor's actions and supporting an increase in
the scale of warfare in the west. It will return with
a despatch detailing the peaceful disarming of the
loyal eastern tribes and the suppression of a revolt
among the Eceni and their allies, the Coritani,
with mention of the ferocity with which they
fought and the extraordinary courage and
discipline of our men in defeating them. It will
be the last ship to travel the seas this winter. By
spring the fresh reports must show a winter's
work. The prefect and I were discussing'

The suppression of a revolt ... Valerius laughed
harshly. The sound rang loud in the quiet room.
Corvus' eyes were black with pain. They fixed on
his.

Ignoring their plea, Valerius said, 'Forget the
spring reports. By the end of winter we will have
been overwhelmed. Those warriors of the Eceni
and Coritani who survived the "suppression" are
even now celebrating with the fox-singer on the
success of his salmon-trap. They will not sleep in
their roundhouses filling their bellies just because
there is snow on the ground.'

'Duplicarius, you go too--'

'No. He has the right. We gave him leave to
speak his mind once before. It's fair he does so
now as long as he is aware that his words are for
this room only and would be considered seditious
were they to be repeated in other company.'

Marcus Ostorius was no longer smiling. He was
twenty years old and he could order any manner
of punishment of a junior officer of the auxiliary
wings and it would be carried out without
question. His tone and his bearing said he could
do so; possibly that he had already done so in  other circumstances. He stood at the open
window staring into the courtyard. Slanting sun
slid across his face, leaving him in shadow.
Outside, a late cockerel reminded them day had long since dawned.

'Tell me.' He spoke without turning. 'If you
were the governor and you needed urgently to
ensure that the united tribes were disunited, or at least did not press their advantage, would you
consider pressing reprisals against them that are
more severe than those already imposed?'

You would as well crucify their children.

'It is the only hope.' Valerius had thought of
little else since his escape from the salmon-trap. 'We could have talked with the elder council, perhaps, after the fort burned and before the battle but not now. If your father wishes to remain governor of a province still under Roman rule, he
will have to single out at least one village and
destroy it. There is no other way.'

'You had somewhere in mind?'

'The first village that sparked the revolt: those
who attacked the Thracian troop. If you hang the
entire population and make as many of the nearby
Eceni as you can find come to watch, they will
spread word to the rest. Let it be known through
them and through Prasutagos that for every
legionary or auxiliary who dies henceforth, an
entire family, picked at random, will die. They
have raised the stakes with their killing of the
scouts and their ambush. The governor must raise
them so high, so fast, that the people themselves
will not allow the dreamers to continue their
war.'

Marcus Ostorius frowned. 'Is it the dreamers'
war? I thought the one with the fox mark was one
of their bards.'

'He was, although he bore the arms of a warrior
and I saw him fight. Even so, the singers and the
dreamers are as one.. The warriors follow their
command, not the other way round. The dreamers
are set against us now and they have the warriors behind them. Our hope of survival rests in our
willingness to do more harm to them than they
can do to us. If we can't, then we should take the
next ship back to Rome.'

'It is easy to say.' Marcus Ostorius turned
abruptly from the window. 'But you are asking the
men to kill women and children without the scent
of battle to give them heart. Would you do it?'

Valerius looked at Corvus. 'If my decurion
ordered me to. Or my prefect.'

Marcus Ostorius closed his eyes briefly.
Opening them, he said, 'Regulus is dead. You have no decurion. Replacements must be found for him
and for all those others who died. At least some of
the promotions will be made on the basis of exceptional valour and the leading of men. If you were to be promoted to decurion, say, of the second troop of the Thracians, third in command of the wing, would you lead them in service of the governor, whatever the order?'

Valerius' world swam. All of his adult life - all
of his life that now mattered - he had served under Corvus, prefect of the Quinta Gallorum. He had
been part of his troop almost since it was first formed. If he had few friends, he had men at whose sides he had fought in battle, whose lives he
had saved, whom he trusted to save him, men he knew as intimately as brothers. All but two of
these were Gauls. Longinus and the Thracians fought under a Roman prefect who had ordered
the hanging of a pregnant girl, a prefect who,
above all else, was not Corvus.

In Valerius' mind, his own voice said, I believed
it would be constructive in the development of my
career. Corvus, breathing easily, laughed as he
replied, I'm sure it will be. Neither of them had
imagined that the development of his career would
require him to leave the wing that was his home
and the man who led it. Neither of them had
wanted it to, until now.

In the hospital, in a quiet room, he needed badly
to sit.

From the bed, Corvus said, 'Marcus ... ?' and
the tribune raised a lazy brow and, smiling, said,
'Of course. I'll be outside when you need me.'

The door closed and they were alone, a newly
made decurion and the man who was no longer
his prefect.

A bench had been placed next to the bed. Valerius
sat on it without asking leave, then stood, remembering
his place, and sat again at Corvus' nod.

Silence held him. What does one say? I saw you
die and if my world had not already ended, it
would have done so then. But I am unable any
longer to feel either rage or grief or love, but can
only mourn their loss. It is the curse of the gods
and the one god cannot lift it. Can you forgive
me? Can we be as we were, knowing I cannot feel?

No point. His answer stood in the felt presence
of the tribune on the far side of the door and the
single informal name spoken as a quiet request: 'Marcus?' Very few beyond close family would
have been granted the right to call the governor's
son by his first name.

Reaching forward, Valerius lifted Corvus' limp
right hand and felt a tremor of intended movement.
In his mind, he could see how it would heal,
given time. That much was good.

In a while, when he had more control of himself,
he looked past the hand to the face beyond it.
What had once been an open book was closed
beyond any power of his to open.

'Why?' he asked.

He did not mean the promotion, but it was
easier for Corvus to answer as if he did. He said,
'Your actions on the battlefield were seen and
reported to the governor. Both the attack on the
dreamer and the fetching of the horses were acts of 
outstanding courage and an example to all the
ranks. These things cannot be put in the despatch
- nothing can be seen to outweigh the tribune's
actions - but they can be rewarded.' Corvus' gaze
became more keenly focused. 'I didn't know you
could command an entire troop of horses by voice
alone.'

'I didn't. They followed the Crow. All I had to
do was point them at the barrier where the
warriors were thickest and the auxiliaries least
and trust they would jump over. The Eceni will not
kill a riderless horse. They don't have it in them.'

'But riderless horses will kill the Eceni?'

'Only if they feel themselves attacked. It's in
their training.'

'And a horse, which has no conscience, will act
by its training. For a man to do so takes more
courage.' Corvus' voice had roughened, losing the
brittle bite. Reaching out with his good left hand,
he asked, 'What did it cost you?' Almost, his face was as it had been.

I knew you were behind the barrier and that
you would die. I would have made you proud of
me, this one last time. The curse has not destroyed
my pride, or yours. It was my gift to you, freely
given, and your black-eyed tribune has stolen it.

Valerius shook his head. 'Nothing.' He let go of
the hand he was holding and drew himself back.
Where Corvus had just recently hidden, he too,
took refuge. 'Why must I join the Thracians when
I have served these last nine years with the Gauls?'

The brittleness returned, and the layers of rank
between them. Corvus said, 'The first troop has
need of a decurion. It's an obvious promotion for
you, a clear demonstration that your actions were
seen and valued. You are a good example. If we
are to survive the winter, we will need men to
show initiative when it counts, and clear courage.'

'Regulus also died. I could remain with the
Gauls.' I would still serve under you. Please let
me?

'No. This is best. The decision is the governor's
but I believe he will take advice from the tribune.' 

And, doubtless, from the prefect whose life his
son has so valiantly saved.

Valerius could have said that last aloud but his
courage was not so great and he found that, after
all, he did not wish to be flogged and demoted to
the ranks for the sake of gaining the last word. He
let go of the hand he had been holding and
smoothed down the bedlinen. 'I should go,' he
said. 'The tribune waits outside and should not be
made to stand for longer than necessary. I wish
you good health and a swift recovery.'

He was by the door when Corvus spoke.

'Valerius?'

'Yes?' He turned too fast. He had not passed
beyond hope.
'Longinus Sdapeze will be made duplicarius of
the first troop, serving directly under you.
Theophilus swears he will be fit to ride by the end
of winter. He's a good man. If you take care of
each other, we may all come out of this alive.'



II.
SUMMER-EARLY AUTUMN AD 51.

IX.

The child was born on Mona, in late summer,
when the fighting was at its height.

Mona was safe. The governor, Scapula,
remained intent on subduing the Silures. His pride
would not let him stop, nor his oath to the
emperor, nearly four years old and not yet fulfilled. He had not yet turned his attention on the dreamers and their island; or, more likely, had not yet gained the military mastery that would allow
him to strike that far north and west. Every spring
for four consecutive years, the II nd legion had held
the very southern tip of the land against attacks from the Durotriges while the XXth had marched
out of their winter encampments and done their best to push their line of forts further west into Siluran territory. In places and at times they had
succeeded. As often, they had failed.

The mountains of the west had become a
constant battleground. Corn was planted an
harvested now only by the very young, the old
and the infirm: all those who could not hold a
weapon in war. Horses were bred in favour of
cattle to replace the many lost in the fighting.
Game became scarce. In those places where Rome
gained ascendancy, the legions hunted to
extinction all that lived within easy reach of the forts. Their indiscriminate felling of the forests to
supply timber and firewood ensured that those
beasts which had fled would not return. In the
occupied lands of the east and south, grain, which
had once been freely owned by those who worked
to plant and harvest it, became the property instead of tax collectors or of the Roman veterans
who owned the land but ordered others to farm it. Starvation stalked the months of winter in ways it
had never done before the invasion.

On Mona alone, life continued as close to normal as was possible with the legions less than
two days' rideaway beyond the straits and the
mountains. Dreamers and singers still took apprentices from amongst those tribes who chose
to send them. Those not under the Roman yoke
sent more than they had ever done, feeling a greater need to be close to the gods. Those who
lived under the shadow of the legions sent few and
in great secrecy and each one came knowing that
if their calling were discovered, their family, at best, would hang.

In the same spirit and with the same fears, girls and boys nearing adulthood who showed the
spirit and potential for war journeyed west to pass
the rites of the long-nights in safety and afterwards,
if their acts and their dreams showed them
worthy, to train at the warriors' school. The
luxury of ten years' tuition was denied them;
many went into battle after their first year, but
some few older ones remained on the island to
hold the core of the school together.

Breaca, who, as god-chosen Warrior of Mona,
should have been teaching the future generations
the skills of battle, spent the greater part of every summer fighting the enemy with those of her own
generation who had survived this far. That much
was different from how things used to be.
Venutios, her predecessor, had left the island only
once in the twelve years of his tenure as Warrior.
In the changed new world of constant war, she was the Boudica and her place was in the front
line of the attacks on the forts, or the ambushes of
supply trains, or the encircling of auxiliary troops
lost in the mountains. Her presence brought heart
to the warriors and fear to the enemy. For the
eight years since the invasion, she had received the blessing and instruction of the gods, relayed
through the dreamers who sat in almost continuous
council, monitoring reports from the
occupied lands. War was her life and, in so far as
anyone could be in a land under threat, she was
content.

It was her body that betrayed her, and the
timing of the gods in sending a child when it was
least needed. There had been nearly seven childless
years since the birth of her son Cunomar. She had
thought herself barren and had not taken the infusions
that would have kept her so in the lull
after the fighting. When, in late winter, the fact of
the pregnancy had become clear, she had panicked,
and sought out Airmid, dreamer, healer and
heart's-friend, to ask her help in its unmaking.
Airmid had smiled, which was a gift in itself.
Unlike the warriors, she had not enjoyed a
winter's respite from the strains of battle. Since
Scapula's slaughter of innocents in the Eceni lands
the dreamers had sought the destruction of the
governor by any means the gods might provide
and winter was their time to discover what that
means might be.

Breaca had walked alone to one of the stone
circles that scattered the island: vast rocks quarri
elsewhere and erected by the ancestors to form a
focus for their dreaming in the days when
the whole land had dreamed. It had been snowing
and the ground was sparsely white. The circle
stood alone in the valley between two low hills.
Stunted, wind-driven oaks leaned to the east; sno
powdered their limbs and fell as grey dust in the
evening light. A huddle of heavily pregnant ewes
found forage in the lee of the circle.

Airmid stood near the westernmost stone, facing
the rising moon. Nemain, god of night and water,
showed her face more distinctly here in the west
than she had ever done when they were children in
the eastern lands of the Eceni. Even now, with
night not yet on them, one could see clearly on her
surface the hare which had brought the first dream
to the people and had acted as messenger ever
since. In the god's light, Airmid became a dream
creature in her own right. Already tall, the linear
shadows cast by the stones on either side made her
taller. White snow made her hair a falling of night,
bound back by the birch bark thong at her brow. A
necklace of silvered frog bones glimmered softly at
her throat, the only outward sign of her dream.
Her eyes were a gateway to the true dreaming, the
messages of the gods, sent to guide the people.

Breaca leaned against the north stone, waiting
for the woman she knew to return and inhabit the
living flesh. Her hands linked on the small mound
of her belly, seeking the pulse of life within. In her
head, she formed the words of apology to a halfmade
soul that it must leave early, with its life's
promise unfulfilled. Her daughter stirred under
her touch. In the gods' space of the circle, she took
form. A young woman, coming near to her longnights,
stood in the gap between two stones that
had just now been empty. She was not the
daughter Breaca would have imagined; a child of
two parents so tall would not be expected to be so
slender and slight, nor her hair so richly dark, the
colour of ox-blood, when her father was corngold
and her mother the burnished red of a
fox in winter. She stood in the drifting snow and
her eyes alone were recognizably Caradoc's, irongrey
and clear, with an honesty that did not
allow for doubt and a depth of love that carved
the soul.

The girl turned, seeking guidance. Her eyes met
those of her mother. The fire of recognition leapt
between them, to be replaced, too fast, by
surprise, then fear, then something intangible that
went beyond either: understanding and surmise
and love buried in grief. Only at the last did she
smile and the sight of it cut through the weight of
the present and became a channel to a past that
had been too long buried.

'Who does she remind you of ?'

Breaca found her eyes closed and opened them.
The dream child was gone. Airmid stood where it
had been, her face still alive with the presence of
the god. 'You thought of someone then,' she said.
'Who was it?'

Words were hard. It was best, suddenly, to
speak without thinking. Breaca said, 'Graine. That
is, my mother. And her sister, Macha, the wren-dreamer. She was both.'

'Then you have two names that would be good.
You will know which one is best when she is born.
There was no question, then, of unmaking the
child.. Breaca said, 'She was a dreamer. I saw
the thong at her brow.' A dreamer bred from two
warriors was not unheard of, simply unusual. She
did not mention the other things she had seen, the
battle-stained tunic and the weapons of war that
were not the tools of a dreamer and were, in any
case, forbidden a girl approaching her long-nights.
Airmid, if, she knew of them, chose not to
comment. Nodding, she smiled a dreamer's smile
of unspoken mysteries. 'She will be,' she said. 'Not
"she was". Remember that always: your daughter
is the future, not the past.'

Winter leaked into spring. Snow melted to muddy
water and filled the rivers cascading down the
mountainsides. Hawthorn blossom hung white
and was shed to be trampled underfoot in the rush
toward spring and the onset of fighting. Leaves
unfurled on the trees and the first shoots of barley
broke through winter earth. Lambs were born and
were followed by foals, stilt-legged in the fields.
The seas opened to traffic and the ferry began to
make its daily way across the narrow straits from
Mona to the mainland, taking dreamers out into
the wider land and, occasionally, bringing warleaders
back for council, or warriors to be healed
of their wounds.

The child who was the future, not the past, grew
steadily in her mother's womb so that, by the third
month of fighting, Breaca was no longer fit to ride
into battle. In disgust, she took the ferry to Mona
that she might not become a burden to Caradoc,
who commanded the western tribes alone in her
absence, nor to Ardacos and Gwyddhien who,
between them, led the trained warriors of Mona.
She would have stayed simply to be close to the
fighting and take part in the strategies and the talk
after battle but in the previous year the legions had
made a practice of sending a troop or two of their
auxiliaries round the perimeter of any fighting to
capture alive the families of those warriors
engaged in the battle. They had hanged some
outside the gates of their forts and sold others into
slavery, but Scapula had long made it known that
the capture alive of the Boudica or Caradoc or any
of their kin was a matter of highest priority and
that their fate, in Rome, would not be the swift
death of a battlefield hanging. It would have taken
more warriors than could be spared to guarantee
Breaca's safety and that, in itself, would have
alerted Scapula to her presence. Thus the Boudica
left her warriors to find victory alone and the
fighting continued unchecked without her.

She was in council when the birth pains began, in
the great-house of the elders of Mona. Built by the
ancestors and maintained by each passing generation, it was large enough to enable every dreamer,
singer and warrior on Mona to fit into it standing
and not feel crowded. The walls were of stone,
cut and dressed by the lost generations in a time so
far back that the oldest tales did not record it. The
vast roof beams were of oak taller than any that
grew on the island; the ancestors had floated them
in from the far northern coast. The dream-mark of
each successive Elder and Warrior was carved in
the wood, spiralling up into the smoke-dense
heights. Stag and snake, horse and salmon, beaver,
fox, eagle, toad; each one came to life when the
fires were lit and the people gathered. Breaca's
own mark of the serpent-spear writhed alongside
the bear that was the dream of Maroc, the elder
dreamer, and beneath the leaping salmon of
Venutios, the man who had been her predecessor
as Warrior and now led half of the Brigantes, the vast northern tribe whose aid could be the straw
that tipped the balance in the battle against Rome.

Venutios was there; the council had been called
on his arrival, meeting swiftly so that he stood
now before the fire in the great-house of the elders
in his travelling cloak, explaining as frankly as
possible the nature of the conflict in Brigante lands
between his own followers and those loyal
to Cartimandua with whom he jointly ruled.
Cartimandua had borne him a daughter, but that
did not mean she shared his hatred of Rome, or
his lifelong care for Mona and the dreamers.
Above all, she loathed Caradoc and had stated
publicly that she would support no venture of
which he was a part. More than anything else, that
hatred strengthened her ties to Scapula and Rome.

Venutios was not a man of great height, and the
conflicting responsibilities of stewardship weighed
him down, but he carried himself with the pride of
one who had been Warrior and his voice was
respected and heard. Firelight danced on his face
as he spoke, flattering the care of years.

'A civil war amongst the Brigantes will be of no
help to anyone,' he said. 'Cartimandua has spies
everywhere. I can raise warriors in secret but the
numbers must be small - a few from each settlement,
meeting as if for hunting. If we muster in
thousands, she will hear of it and betray us to the
enemy. If Rome were distant, this would not be an
undue hardship, but the Fourteenth legion is
already camped on our borders. To be certain of
defeating them, I would have to raise ten thousand
and I cannot do that. With less, we are always
at risk of attack before ever we reach the
battleground.'

Speaking for the council, Breaca asked, 'How
many warriors can you safely bring without its
being known?'

'A thousand. Maybe two.'

'More than that.' A young, straw-haired
warrior of the Brigantes spoke up from his place
on the other side of the fire. Standing to be better
heard, he said, 'It may be that the war bands of the
Selgovae would join us from the north. They are
not numerous, but Cartimandua has no spies
amongst them. That would give us another
thousand.'

It went against protocol for any to speak out of
turn but the youth, Vellocatus, was cousin's cousin
to Venutios and had supported him from the
moment the elders of the Brigantes had called the Warrior back from Mona. His point was heard
and accepted.

In her head, Breaca mapped out the numbers
and position of the legions and the tribes as the
last reports had placed them, adding in Venutios'
promised warriors.

'That may be enough,' she said. 'We are five
months into the fighting and the legions are faring
badly. Scapula has sworn to come west but even
so, his men are losing morale. With three
thousand, we could--'

She stopped, biting down on her lip. The
sporadic clenching of her womb, which had been
mellow and bearable, became suddenly neither of
those things. She stared fixedly at the fire until it
passed. Nobody spoke. Of those dreamers and
elders present, many were women who had borne
children of their own. The men, for the most part,
had aided as many births as she had fought
battles.

In the temporary relief after, she said, rapidly, 'I
must go. Get word to Caradoc of the three
thousand. He will know how best to use them.
With that many, fresh and well armed, we can
crush Scapula before he has time to call for reinforcements.
Tell him-' A sharp wave spiked
and died. 'Tell Caradoc to use the salmon-trap
again. It worked for Dubornos in the east. It will
do so again here.' She took her leave after that,
swiftly. Hail ran at her heel.

That had been the late afternoon. By the long,
insect-ridden dusk, the pains were so close that she could count the intervals in breaths and the length
of each spasm in heartbeats. It was thirty breaths
and ten beats when Airmid came to join her.

'You should walk.'

'I've been walking since I got here. I've walked
enough for now.'

She was in the same stone circle in which she
had the first vision of who her daughter could be.
It was not a common choice of delivery place.
Summer births on Mona frequently took place in
the open, but most of the women chose the forest
or the river bank and were guarded at need against
wild beasts. The circle stood on a piece of open
moorland and if it lacked shelter, the risks of
attack were slight. In the circle, Breaca had Hail
for protection. The three-legged hound was still
one of Mona's better hunters; neither beast nor
invading army would reach her while he lived. He lay in the lengthening shadows at the edge of the
circle and padded at her side when she walked
the perimeter. Her blade and shield hung from one
of the westerly stones, more to give strength to the
child than to provide protection for the mother.
More useful were the two stakes, already driven
into the turf a shoulder width apart in the centre
of the circle, ready for her to brace against at the
last heaving. She was a while away from needing  them. The next wave took her, shuddering. She
pressed her forehead to stone and counted: twelv
beats now.

Airmid came to stand behind her. A cool hand
wrapped her belly, feeling the muscles tense
beneath. Breaca felt the frown but couldn't see it.
In a soft, clear voice, the dreamer asked, 'Is there
pain?'

'A little. When the pressure is highest.' Breaca
turned round and put her back to the stone. The
cold on her shoulders helped her think. 'Has
Venutios gone to raise his war band?'

'Soon. He'll wait until nightfall to take the ferry.
Vellocatus has gone ahead to seek aid of the
Selgovae; he is not so widely known and so can
travel more safely. If it can be done, they will brim
us the three thousand. You are not to think of it
now.' Hail was beside her, leaning his weight
against her thigh. On the other side, Airmid took
her arm. 'Come with me. We'll go round the circle
again and then I'll light a fire. We can douse it
later, when the babe comes. This one should be
born only into moonlight. Nemain will shed light
on her own.'

The sun rested on the horizon, hurling ever
deeper reds into the darkening blue. Insects in
their thousands reached the height of their feeding.
Airmid lit a fire and laid pine needles on it to
make smoke to keep them off. Later, when that
was not enough, she brought from her belt-pouch
a stoppered flask and smeared the infusion it contained
on herself, Breaca and Hail. The smell was
of stewed fungi, as familiar a scent of summer as
cut hay and mare's milk. Long ago, in their joint
childhood, Breaca had planned a gift of the same
for Airmid but had been forestalled. She wanted to
say so but a cramp came on her that lasted a full
sixty heartbeats and she was gasping for breath by
the end.

'Keep walking.'

'I can't. She's here, I can feel her.'

'Then come and kneel at the stakes and let me see
where you're at.'

The stakes were of ash wood, planed smooth,
with the sharp end driven an arm's length into the
ground and a spear's height left above it. Caradoc
had made them in spring before the fighting
started, had spent two full days painting them that
he might be with her in spirit if he could not be in
fact. The eagle and the serpent-spear, his mark and
hers, ran in chains along the lengths of each  with
the war hammer of the Ordovices and the running
horse of the Eceni at either end.

Horse hides rolled with the hair outwards made
a bench between them so that when Breaca knelt,
leaning forward to grasp each stake and resting
her arms on the hides, she made the shape of a
foaling mare. From the times of the ancestors, the
Eceni had given birth in this way. It made for
vigorous children and, in a strong dam, ensures a
fast, clean delivery.

Another wave came and passed and then another,
stronger now so that she could not breathe through
them. Airmid spoke from behind her.

'That's good. The birth-sac is here.'

Strong fingers probed. Something broke within
her and water gushed, hotly. The salt-sweet of
birthing fluid spiked the air. Breaca said, 'She
doesn't, feel like Cunomar.'

'She's a different person. Wait for the next wave
and put your strength behind it.'

She did so, repeatedly, in pain and without
success. Over time, the insects withdrew and the
fire dulled to embers. Hail fell asleep and
dreamed, twitching. The sky became a purpled
bruise spreading wider until the sun gave the lighting of the world over to Nemain, the moon, who
rose almost full above the top edges of the standing stones. In the centre of the circle, under the
god's light, Airmid of Nemain struggled to bring
her successor into life.

'Breaca, she's coming backwards. It will be
harder than Cunomar and may take longer. If you
can hold and not press, I'll see if I can turn her.
Can you do that?'

'I can try.'

A battlefield was so much easier. There, at least,
she could do more than simply breathe and let the
imperatives of her body clash within. She held her
breath while Airmid slid a bloodied hand alongside
the child and when she had to breathe, she did
so in sucked gasps that did not spark the next
wave of spasms. The noise of it brought Hail to
her side. Laying his head on the horse-hide bench
next to her arms, he crooned gently, his old eyes
worried. She had no breath left to reassure him;
the pressure of waiting took everything she had.
In the end, she could hold no longer and the pain
this time left her sobbing.

'Drink this. Drink it, Breaca. You must. We
have to turn her or bring her backwards. Drink. It
will help.'

Airmid was at her head, who had been behind.
The world swam, nauseatingly. She felt a cup
pressed to her lips and drank. The infusion was
bitter and she did not recognize the taste. The
hand that held her was jellied with blood and
slime; her own.

Rarely, she had seen mares when the foal would
not come. Macha, who had managed the births in
the Eceni village of her childhood, had two
responses. In those cases where the mare was
everything, she had taken a blade in her cupped
hand and, sliding it into the womb, had cut the
living foal to pieces, that it might be pulled out
and leave the mare intact. In those cases where the
foal was the end of a long waiting, the result of
many planned matings on whom a dynasty
depended, or the dam was clearly dying, she had
taken a spiked lump hammer to the mare's head,
killing it cleanly before cutting it open to drag the
foal, living, from the womb.

Raggedly, after the next wave, Breaca said, 'Use
the hammer. Don't kill the child.'

'Don't say it. We will have both of you alive.'
That was the great joy with Airmid, one never had
to explain. Equally, the dreamer could not hide the
concern in her voice as she might have done from
another birthing mother; knowing it, she did not
try. Instead, she said, 'I need Efnis to help. Or
Luain mac Calma. Can you wait with Hail while I
find one of them?' and left, because there had,
never been a doubt of the answer.

Pain drew her thin and compressed her again. In
the midst of it were three voices and then hands on
her shoulders, raising her higher. A voice rich with
the accents of the northern Eceni said, 'Breaca, we
need you to stand. Can you do that for us? Don't
let go of the stakes, just stand upright between
them so the babe points down. Hail will stay with
you. I'll move the mare's hide out of the way.'

Another, with the faintest touch of Hibernia,
said, not to her, 'This one is Nemain's child, and
will come only for her light. I'll get a bowl with
water and we will give her the reflection. She will
come more willingly for that. Can you keep her
steady for that long?'

Time took hold of the answer and spun it out in
a web of meaningless syllables, in the centre of
which, like a waiting hunter, was a cracked and
tearing pain. It ended, blindingly, in a wash of
silver that faded into night.

Graine, daughter of Breaca, granddaughter of
Graine, first-born daughter of the royal line of the
Eceni, came into life in the care of the land's three
most powerful dreamers, slipping bloody between
their hands towards a bowl of tarnished moonlight.
Her mother remained conscious for the birth
and for long enough to walk back to the hut set
apart for newly delivered women, but fell into
sleep shortly afterwards, her new daughter naked
at her breast. She woke once a while later and was
helped out to the appointed place to pass clotted
blood and mucus and the turgid mass of the afterbirth
and returned to feed her child and sleep
again. The infant was redly bald and bruised
where the birth had squeezed her tight, and her
unfocused infant gaze was the blue of the sky after
rain. In her mother's eyes, she was perfect.

x.

'She's ugly. Will she always be ugly? I don't want
a sister that's ugly.'

The voice was high and peevish, made loud by
hurt and fear. It broke into dreams of a future in
which the children came safely to their long-nights
and wore newly woven tunics, free from the
blood and dust of battle. Breaca turned her head
to the side. Noon sun pierced the loose thatch of
the hut in which she lay, casting knife-edge
shadows across the floor. Her son, thus transected,
stood halfway between the door and her bed.
Behind him, Airmid grimaced an apology and left.

'Cunomar.' Breaca stretched a hand to him.
Graine, who had been feeding, rocked slack-jawed
from her breast.

'Look, she can't even suck properly. How Will
she eat when we are away, fighting the legions?'

'She's sleeping, beloved. She can suck strongly
when she wants to.' He was seven years old and
had been supplanted. He was not consoled. The
space between them grew desolate. She said,
'Heart-of-life, will you come to me? I could get up,
but it feels like a long way from here.'

She used the Eceni, which he had been learning,
and addressed him as she did his father. Like a shy
horse, Cunomar came forward to her outstretched
hand, eyeing askance the new unwanted thing that
had arrived to shake his world. Breaca tried to
remember how she had felt when Ban was born,
or, later, Silla, and failed. Life had been different
then; a sibling always a thing to cherish. He
reached her bed and stroked her hair as it fell back
from her brow; his touchstone for safety.

'Hail's here.' He offered the hound's presence as
a gift and she knew its cost. 'I stayed with him
through the morning like Airmid asked. He
wanted to come back to you sooner but I wouldn't
let him. He's waiting outside now. Should I call
him in?'

'In a while, when I've had time alone with you.'
She made herself smile against a sudden uncertainty.
She was not alone with her son and
never would be. She had forgotten how it would
be, how it had been with Cunomar; until his birth, she had not known it was possible to hold so small
a thing so dear. Until that moment, she had not
known the terrifying, glorious truth that the part
of her heart not already given to others had just
split afresh in two and one part was newly
installed in a separate body.

Graine woke, searching muzzily for the nipple.
Cunomar tentatively touched a foot and watched
its languid withdrawal.

'She's very small.'

'Yes, but like a  foal, she will grow big.'

'Not as big as me.'

'No, I don't think so. You will always be bigger.'
He was his father in all but temperament and the
colour of his eyes; he would have his father's
height. 'Cunomar-' She made herself be serious.
'The legions are not yet defeated. If your father
and the gods work well, it may be that they will be
defeated this year.' She saw his sudden panic, swiftly
hidden, and worked not to show it. 'Even if so, there
will be more battles beyond it; the tribes south of the
sea-river would welcome the legions back and they
would have to be defeated.'

'So the fighting could go on for years?' The
thought cheered him, visibly.
'It could. And if your father and I are in it, then we could be killed, you know that.'

'Yes.' His eyes were entirely his own, an acorn
brown fading to amber. Neither parent and none
of the grandparents had shared those. Now they
stretched wide as he stopped thinking of himself
and thought of the possibility of his parents' death
in battle. Solemnly he said, 'We would sing of you
for generations.' He had heard it at some fireside,

'That would be kind, but I would ask a further
favour of you.' She watched him brighten, then
saw suspicion creep at the margins. Before it could
take hold, she said, 'If we are both killed, your
sister will be your closest living kin. I believe one
day she will be a great dreamer, possibly of a
power to match Airmid, or Luain mac Calma, but
only if she grows safe to her long-nights and
beyond. She mustn't know the power she has; it
would change her growing. You must swear to me
on the lives of the ancestors that you will never tell
her without my permission. Will you do that?'

In her own way, Breaca could make magic, if
only with her son. The new sister was to be a
dreamer, not a warrior, and so was not a threat.
Moreover, he would be warrior to a dreamer, as
his mother was to Airmid. His feelings for Airmid
were complex, but at the bedrock lay awe and a
profound respect. For Luain mac Calma, he felt
the fear of a child who has seen a man call lightning
from the sky and believes him half a god.

His eyes were luminous, truly amber. The oath
with which he swore was long and bound him
absolutely in sickness, health and all manner of
inebriation not to breathe a word to his sister
of her possible future. He stumbled only on the
child's name, which was unfamiliar.

'Graine. It's Graine, after my mother. Good. So
then, if your father and I are killed, Graine will
need someone to protect her. I could ask one of the
other warriors, but it would best be her brother,
who will care for her always. In the beginning, she
can know that you protect her as a brother. Only
later, we can tell her that you will be warrior to
her dreamer. Would you pledge that for me, here,
on the serpent-blade?'

His smile reflected the sun. He may have loved
her and feared Luain mac Calma, but he regarded
his mother's blade with the far more prosaic
worship of a would-be warrior for the weapon
that will one day be his own.

It hung from a hook above the sleeping place,
always to hand. She let him reach it down and lay
it, sheathed, on the hides at her side. Carefully, she
drew a hand's length free so the mackerel stripes
of the weld-patterns shimmered in the light. Even
so little brought forth its history: the months of
making by her father with her spit and his sweat
melded into the metal and the score upon score of
lives taken after. Cunomar gasped a child's breath
of ecstasy. Breaca, who was more hardened to the
sight, felt its song weakly in the old scar on her
palm that was the relic of her first kill and warned
her always of battle.

This oath was more formal. For generations, a
warrior had pledged the protection of a certain
dreamer with words laid down in the times of the
ancestors. Breaca was speaking the phrases for
him to follow when a shadow crossed the doorway. She counted five legs and wondered that Hail
should be so reticent. It was not like the hound to
stay silent when someone approached, unless that
one could prevent him from barking a warning or he knew such a warning to be unnecessary. A
light breeze brought her the scents of horse sweat
and man sweat and the iron-blood of battle and
she chose not to believe it. The day was good; to
hope and have that hope dashed would destroy it.

'... guard her life with mine, to the ends of the
earth and the four winds.'

Cunomar pronounced the final phrases with the
care of one handling the newborn. The strength of
the oath and its binding altered his face, showing
for the first time who he could be when grown.
Breaca watched him with half an eye. Behind him,
the five-legged shadow stepped into the doorway
and divided: two legs and three. Cunomar heard
his mother's indrawn breath and turned, his face
alight.

'You're here!'

The young could squeal it as the grown could
not. Cunomar threw himself into his father's arms,
breathlessly relaying muddled and misunderstood
facts of the birth. Thus far, the magic had worked.
In the presence of Caradoc, who was most
certainly a god on earth, the child was no longer
the supplanted favourite, but a sworn protector,
charged with eternal care of his ward.

Caradoc held his son to his chest and let him
ramble. His eyes asked the necessary questions of
Breaca, his heart's ease, and had them answered.
In Eceni, too fast for Cunomar to follow, he said,
'Airmid has told me the details of the birth but no
more. I gather we have the gods and dreamers to
thank that you are both alive. Is she as you
dreamed?'

'I believe so, In twelve years we will know.'

Hail came to Breaca, laying his vast, grizzled
head on her shoulder, his eyes on the child. He had
licked her clean and already took her care to heart.
traine tipped her head to the new scent and stared
at him vacantly. Then, with a little help, she
looked up at her father. 

Because she was watching, Breaca saw
the moment when Caradoc changed, when the
tensions and strains of war fell away, when he let
go of the war leader and became simply the father,
in first company of his daughter. It was a sight as
precious as any she had seen or could hope to see.
Caradoc had one daughter, Cygfa, by a differen
mother. Breaca had not been sure, until she saw it,
if a second would mean as much.

She ought not have doubted him; in that
moment of meeting, he was a youth again, shipwrecked and washed up on a headland, hovering
in the space between life and death with his heart
freely visible for all to see. She had fallen in love
with him then and did so again now.

Kneeling at the bedside, he reached forward a
tentative finger, knuckle bent, to stroke his
daughter's face. 'She is you,' he said. 'The most
beautiful woman alive.'

'I don't think so.' Breaca grinned, an unexpected, welcome sensation. 'She's Graine if she's
anyone, with Macha's heart and power, although
she doesn't look like either of them until she
smiles. And she has your eyes. You can't see them
in her yet, but they'll be clear when she's grown.
Grey eyes and dark red hair, the colour of
oxblood.'

Caradoc lifted his gaze from his daughter. His
smile was a well-spring of infinite courage. 'She's
you inside,' he said. 'In her ' soul. I can see that
already.' Leaning forward, he kissed her. His lips
were dry and salt from the sea wind and rasped
against hers. His breath joined her breath. His
world enfolded hers and she was afloat in the sea
he held.

Breaca lay in summer shade and knew her life
perfect. Graine squirmed and shifted to the other
breast, rocking her. Cresting the tide of it, Caradoc
came to sit at her side, Cunomar on his knee. He
was stained with the dust of travel and the old
blood of killing and the unkind spray of the
straits. His skin, which had once been fair and
smooth as a girl's, was weathered to oak boarding
and scarred on both sides of his face. His hair,
bright as polished gold after a summer's sun, was
uncombed and was marked at the brow by the line
of a helmet, or cap. He had travelled, then, in
some haste and with his hair covered as partial
disguise. Since the invasion neither he nor the
Boudica had worn a helmet in battle. Their hair
was their best banner and gathering mark for the
warriors. His eyes were a little bloodshot, as they
became when he lacked sleep. His hand lifted hers
and Breaca felt the calluses of the sword hilt match
the smoother, less ridged lines of her own. In three
months, she had softened. She imagined the work
it would take to reach battle fitness again and
winced. Her mind turned back to war.

'Venutios,' she said. 'He can bring his Brigantes
and a thousand Selgovae'

'I know.' He hooked his fingers under hers and
kissed the backs of her knuckles, lightly. 'And we
have a place to set the salmon-trap. It's all in hand.
This once, you can let the battle slide you by. If it
goes well, the dreamers will have their greatest
wish fulfilled by the moon's wane or a little after.'

The dreamers had only one wish that great.
Sunlight died inside her. 'Scapula's here?' she
asked.

'Not yet, but soon. He's marching west with
fresh recruits to bring the western legions back up
to strength. Word is that he will go first to the
fortress of the Twentieth and then come north
with all of that legion and three cohorts of the
Second. When he gets here, we will be ready to
fight.'

'But he'll drive west, to the heart of the Silures'
land. We need him further north if Venutios' war
band is to join us.'

'I know. It's been seen to. The legate of the
Twentieth has good reason to believe we are massing
against him in the north. Scapula will come to
us where and when we want him.'

... has good reason to believe. Horror brushed
her spine. In the past, warriors of outstanding
courage had 'defected' to the legions. Not one of
them had escaped with their lives and most, if the
spies were correct, had died slowly under Roman
blades and irons, skin peeled back, eyes gouged
and flesh burned to tear the truth of their hearts
from their mouths. The only word Scapula would
believe now would be that of a wounded man or
woman captured alive on the battlefield, who
would live long enough to spread the lie, but not
so long that the truth could follow. It was a
sacrifice greater than any she wished to imagine
and it came to her suddenly that she did not know
who had made it. At any other time, she would
have known as friends each of those who had prepared
themselves to be taken, would have spent
time with them before the battle and prayed for
them afterwards, sitting by fire or water with
Airmid, or Efnis or Luain mac Calma until they
were sure the soul had crossed to Briga and was
free.

She could have asked for a name or names, but
did not. The question came to the front of her
teeth and stopped there, held by Graine who
squirmed, wide-eyed and helpless, on her breast so
that, once again, Breaca 'fell into the vast, incoherent
space where her own unbounded love
met unbounded terror for the life and welfare of
her daughter and the knowledge that, for the rest
of her life, she would want to protect this child
and keep her free from all harm, and that,
ultimately, she could not.

It was not a time to sink into the horror of
another's pain. She took Caradoc's hand and held
it. Together, they each cupped their daughter's
back and felt her smallness shift and mumble
beneath their touch. Briga was mother of life as
well as death; one could believe with all one's
heart that a new child and the hope she brought
was prayer enough for her protection.

In a while, when Breaca could think more
clearly and look ahead at where another part of
her heart would ride alone into danger, she asked,
'Where will you set the trap?'

Caradoc was a war leader and he loved her. He
could imagine a little of the frustrations of the one
left at home. He gave her what she needed with
the crisp exactitude of a council summary. 'It's
already half set at the river of the Lame Hind.
There is only one route the legion could take out
of the fortress. It crosses the river at the lower
fording place. Gwyddhien and Ardacos are there
now, building a barrier in the cleft between the
mountains. We will hold them at the river awhile
and then fall back to the barrier, then let them
flow over it and on into the valley beyond. The far
end is already blocked by a rock-fall so that no
legion can get beyond it. We will hit them from the
sides. If Venutios can bring his two thousand
Brigantes, even without the war bands of the
Selgovae, he can take them from behind and we
will crush them to pulp. If he fails, we will kill as
many as we may and then leave them. There are
forests on either side and behind that no Roman
will dare to enter.'

'Can you win?'

'I don't know.' He had always been honest with
her. 'It's one battle of many and it depends on a lot
of things over which we have no control. We may
not win, but we won't lose.'

It was a good plan, marred only by one thing.
She had thought of it in the midst of birthing,
when the pains were at their height. 'What will
you do if Scapula recognizes the salmon-trap from
the battle in the Eceni lands? He may not take it.'

He smoothed a hand through her hair and ran
his fingers over her scalp. She pushed against the
flat of his palm like a hound seeking a caress. His
shoulder leaned into hers as Hail's did, a steady
presence, for ever hers. The slow surety of his
smile soaked into her bones.

'I think he'll take it. The gods are on our side.
Half the legion will be raw recruits, with poor
discipline. If they see us in retreat, they'll follow
and Scapula won't want to stop them. In any case,
he didn't see the first salmon-trap. He will have heard of it but that was four years ago and a
hundred battles have passed since then. There's no
reason to think he'll remember the detail of that
one above the rest. The only one who was there
and will remember is the decurion who rides the
pied horse. He broke the barrier; there is no chance he will forget. Our only hope is that he will not come this far west.'

'Or that he dies early.' A sourness filled her
mouth. More even than Scapula, the shadow of
that man's reputation dulled the morning. Word
of the atrocities amongst the Trinovantes had
spread west like slow poison and the trails of his
dead wailed in her sleep on the nights when the
battles did not take all of her dreams. She said,
'Airmid could find the decurion for you now. She
has felt enough of the death he has wrought. A knife in the dark could kill him. The gods know
that one does not deserve a death in battle.'

She had not meant it as an oath but there was
more power in her one spoken breath than all of
Cunomar's careful recitation, swearing the protection of his sister. The gods listened and heard
and somewhere, in other worlds, was an echo.
Moths panicked in her chest. The somnolence
of motherhood broke and became the urgency of
combat. Breaca lay flat on the bed and stared at 
the thatch and, for a while, forgot that she had
ever become a mother.

Caradoc brought her back, slowly, with the
stroke of his fingers on the nape of her neck. Still,
the joy of the morning had gone and could not be
recovered. Drily, she asked, 'When will it happen,
the trap against Scapula?'

'Within the month. Scapula is marching west
already.'

'Then you must leave soon?'

'Not that soon.' His smile was the making and
breaking of her heart. 'The legions are marching
slowly and he will go south first. I think we have
ten days to repair the weapons and heal the
wounded. Most of the others have returned to
their hearths to help with the harvest. I've never
been very good at cutting barley. I had thought to
have at least that much time in peace with my 
family.'

Leaning over, he kissed her a third time and she
found that it was not, after all, too late to recover
the joy in the morning.

XI.

'We ride to take Caratacus, to kill him or to
capture him, to wipe out his mountain rebels and
bring peace to the west.'

Scapula said it in the great hall of the praetorium at Camulodunum, speaking to five
thousand newly trained infantry and two wings of
horsemen on the morning before they marched
west. The new recruits repeated it, chanting in
marching rhythm with the verbs made scurrilous
and Scapula as much their target as the man they
marched to kill. The cavalry spoke it to their
horses, quietly, as a prayer and a protection; they
had ridden against enemy horsemen and knew
their mettle.

Julius Valerius, decurion of the first troop, the
First Thracian Cavalry, second in command of
the entire wing and thereby acting leader of the
half-wing currently on campaign, heard it
repeated over and over in the rhythm of the Crow-horse's feet and felt the promise of ultimate
vengeance fill him as a gift from his god, made
greater by the absence of the ghosts and the nightmares. Always, they fled in the face of action, even
when that action was against women and children
in a three-hut steading. In the face of real war, they 
were gone so far it was possible to imagine
they might never have been. He slept well and ate
well and drank for pleasure not for need.
Longinus Sdapeze rode with him, recovered from
his war-wounds and promoted to standard-bearer
of the troop. The man was intelligent and thoughtful and he understood better than anyone living
the mercurial swing of Valerius' moods.

We ride to kill Caratacus. Caradoc. To kill him.
To kill...

As far as it could be, his life was perfect.

The rain began on the third day out of
Camulodunum. Without a following wind, it fell
thinly from a patchy sky, a warm, steady drizzle
that saturated hide and hair and leather and wool,
that made slick the tracks worn to ruts by the
tread of the several thousand new recruits who
had marched this route over the past eight years to
die for Rome in the wild mountains of the west.

Sadly, the clouds did not cover the waning
moon, which hung palely on the western horizon.
The Thracians considered it ill luck and cited the
rain as proof that they were right. Valerius rode
his pied horse at a walk through the mud and
listened to the mutterings of his men as they grew
in conviction and coherence. A horse drew up on
his left-hand side.

'Someone should tell the governor'

'No.'

'You don't know what I was about to say.'
Longinus contrived to sound aggrieved which was a significant achievement given that it was less
than a month  since an accident in the practice
arena had seen him take a shield rim across the
throat and he had not been able to speak for
several days, nor even, in the first night, to breathe.

Valerius grinned, acidly. 'I know exactly what
you were about to say. You want me to inform the
emperor's representative in this province that his
army should wait in the night-camp until the
moon sets - which will be halfway to noon - or
turn back to Camulodunum and delay his advance
until the rising of the new moon, at which time the lady's light will grant certain victory ' in war and love to all men, although why anyone should want
Caradoc to have the same luck as us is beyond me.
I tell you what-' He turned in his saddle. 'You tell
the governor. I bet you my horse against yours that you'll be less than three words into the first
sentence before he hears your voice and has you dismissed from the ranks and sent home. If he's
having a really bad day, he'll send the rest of us
back as your escort.'

Valerius had gone to some lengths to keep the
extent of the Thracian's injuries from his
superiors. In certain quarters, it was believed that
a man who could not shout his orders across a
battlefield was a liability to himself and his troop.
Valerius did not believe it and he did not want
anyone to have an excuse to exclude Longinus
from the battle plans. In the uncertain politics of
the fortress, there was a very real likelihood
that the entire wing would have been left behind
to keep him company.

Longinus knew the reality as well as anyone.He
shook his head. 'I don't want your horse. It's
simply that, as your standard-bearer, I don't want
to see you dead sooner than you have to be.' The
Thracian's cavalry cloak fell in sodden folds to his
horse's rump and his rain-darkened hair straggled
from beneath his helmet, but even in the rain he
had the stare of a hawk. It was the sharpness of his
eyes that set him apart from his compatriots,
giving light as they did to the sharpness of his
mind.

Valerius had a great respect for the sharpness of
Longinus' mind. 'Why should I be dead? Is it the
moon or is there something else?'

'I don't know. I can't see the way that you caan.
I know only that there is something coming that is
worse than battle. When I know what it is, I'll tell
you. In the meantime, I think you should take
your horse and ride it somewhere hard and fast.
You're as cramped in as he is and it's upsetting the
men. They're afraid you'll take it out on them
when we get to the fortress.'

'I'll take it out on them before that if I can find
something for them to do. Tell them. It'll giv
them something else to worry about that isn't the
moon.'

'I don't have to. They all have ears. They heard.'

'Good.'

The mountains remained in the distance and the
marching men passed through gentler land, just
past harvest. The wars of east and west had not
touched the centre of the province and, even in the
rain, the fecundity of this place was clear. On
either side of the track, men and women of the
Catuvellauni cut beans in long, straight-sided
fields. Elsewhere, ewes and lambs grazed, guarded by youths with throwing sticks. In larger paddocks, young weaned bulls fought each other
haphazardly or watched from the shelter of aged
beech and oak that the axe had not yet sought out.
Buzzards circled high over fields where corn stood
in shining sheaves and scruffy children, with
sapling hounds hunted the rats that made their
nests within.

The children were the only ones to respond to
the column of armed men passing through their
land. In the beginning, as the first centuries of the
first cohort had passed them by, they had run to
the field edges to stare. The boldest among them
had skipped alongside offering the men water or
pocketfuls of malted barley or twists of smoked
meat in return for a coin or a carving. Later, as the
morning grew old and the armoured ribbon did
not cease, they grew bored and returned to the
rats, who gave more sport more consistently. Only
when the cavalry passed did they turn once again
to stare at the horses and nudge each other and lay
uncollectable wagers as to which was fastest, or
would make the best brood mare.

Valerius came last of the last, the snake's second
head, guarding the rear. He felt the children's eyes
on the pied horse as they came within sight
and heard the change in tenor of the whispers and
knew, with a familiar, unnameable mix of resentment and defiance, that he was recognized here as
readily as he was in the east and if here, then it would be the same in the west. The pied horse felt
the tension of his hands through the reins and set
its jaw against the bit. If he chose, Valerius could
lose himself in fighting it.

'They will be waiting for you, the spear-carriers
of the mountains, if we ever see the field of battle.'
Longinus rode a mare that should have been
almost as well known as Valerius' mount but,
being chestnut and blandly marked, was not.

'Is that the source of your bad feeling - that they
will know me?'
'It should be; they will have their dreamers 
mark you and set the spear-throwers on you from
the start, but no, it's something more than that. I'll
tell you when I know. In the meantime, there's a
river ahead that's flowing fast enough to make
the swimming hard. If you want something for the 
men to do, that might provide it.'

Longinus had always thought like an officer,
Valerius grinned. 'If I make them ford it, they'll
think it was my idea.'

'Would they be wrong?'

'No. Would you care to bet that Axeto loses
hold of his horse before he reaches the far side?'

'Hardly, that's a certainty. But I'll lay you the
first flagon of wine tonight that he's mounted
again before the last of the others is on land and
that he doesn't lose his sword to the river gods this
time.'

'Done.'

Valerius commanded the eight troops who made
up the left half of the wing. Of those, the first
seven were strung out ahead along the sides of the
marching column; only his own troop rode with
him at the rear, his fangs in the snake's second
head. They were his honour guard and they
moulded themselves on the pattern of the enemy
that was as much the pattern of Thrace. They
loved him and they hated him and they had all
smelled the river and then seen it and the order to
swim, when it came, was not a surprise.

They were alone in their endeavour. Dry-footed,
the infantry crossed the water on one of two
bridges built by the engineers of the XXth when
that legion first marched west. The other half-wing
of cavalry, the Quinta Gallorum, assigned to
the head of the column, had long since walked
their horses across in warmth and comfort; in all
likelihood, they were at the fortress already,
settled and resting. The early troops of the Prima
Thracum had similarly crossed without incident.
Lacking an order from Valerius, their decurions
had not made them swim.

The thirty-two men and horses of the first
troop, who trained under a decurion who had
trained with the Batavians on the Rhine, dismounted, tied their helmets more tightly on their
heads and fixed their swords to their belts with
leather thongs tied in a complex loop that might
be easily undone even when wet. In fours, they
took to the water, swearing viciously at the cold
and then at the current and then at the cold again
as they emerged, four abreast in good order, on the
other side. The jeers of the infantry watching from
the banks became slowly less derisive.

Longinus and Valerius swam it last, as rear
guard, turning a slow circle in the middle of the
river because they were officers and must be seen
to do more than their men. The water was
brownly turbid and the current swift. It grabbed at
armour, limbs and harness with searching hands.
They swam holding their horses and then let them
go, to show that they could do that, too. They
emerged onto dry land and the wind, mild as it
was, cut through wet wool to the shivering skin
below.

Valerius said, 'We should have brought wine.'

'I did, but not enough for the entire troop. In
any case, you owe me a flagon. Axeto didn't lose
his sword.'

'You'll lose it before we get to the fortress. In The
meantime, the horses need to run. Take half the men
a mile up ahead and circle back. I'll take the others
when you're back.'


The rain ceased at some point between the time when the moon set and the sun replaced it low in the rinsed sky above the mountains. Threaded
cloud caught fire above the jagged silhouettes of
the peaks, spreading from saffron to scarlet to a
bruised purple where the rain still hung on the
lowest edge of the skyline. The upper layer of
cloud was turning from lilac to an uncoloured
grey as the last of the cavalry approached the
fortress of the XXth: the legion's home in the west.

This was not a night-camp built by legionaries
of sods and carried staves, nor a frontier post,
designed to last only as long as the fighting season,
but an unassailable edifice of stone and wood built
by the same engineers as those who had first put
together the fortress at Camulodunum.

Exactly as at Camulodunum, a lively settlement
had grown beyond the oak stockade of this new
fortress. Merchants' huts lined the road leading in
from the east to the lion-mounted gate of the porta
praetoria and others spread back and out from
that central trunk. On the margins- were living
huts and fenced enclosures in which the livestock
of the traders grazed and sheltered. At the outermost
ring larger paddocks housed the breeding
herds of cattle and their attendant bulls.

Approaching them, Valerius heard before he
saw the cluster of men leaning in over the dry
stone wall surrounding the most easterly of the
fields. Closer, he saw the red hair and armbands
of the Gaulish cavalry, all alike in russet tunics
with the Capricorn and the Eye of Horus stitched
on the left sleeve. Corvus' men, riding at the head
of the column, had arrived, settled their horses,
taken their orders, paraded for their governor and
the legate of the XXth and been dismissed. They
had eaten and drunk and then, because they were 
not required the next day to ride into battle, they
had drunk some more until someone, somewhere,
offered a wager which was more enticing than
further drink, or perhaps involved further drink
and likely some violence and a woman, or a boy
or a pliant sheep. The Gauls were not well known
for their moderation, or their ability to stay clear
of trouble when drunk.

'This is it.' Longinus pushed the chestnut mare
alongside Valerius' horse. She shied a little at the
noise coming from the field and pushed at the bit.
As much as any of their mounts, she knew the 
smell of war and yearned for it.

'The ill luck you felt?'

'Yes. We should ride by.'

They should and they would not, each knew
that. Already Valerius had heard the rising nasal
whine of Umbricius, the man who had been
actuary in the days when they had both served
under Corvus in the Gaulish horse. Umbricius
hated his old billet-mate and was hated in his turn.
The man had soured since the battle against the
Eceni,resenting himself and Valerius for surviving
when most of their troop had died. On top of that,
he had watched Valerius rise in the ranks of the
Thracian horse while he himself had remained an
actuary. It had been Umbricius who had thrust the
shield edge into Longinus' throat in practice and it
had been as much an attack on Valerius as on the
Thracian. The flogging ordered by Valerius afterwards had been every bit as personal.

Umbricius' presence alone would have drawn
Valerius in, but over it he had heard the bellow of
a bull in pain and the bull was the god's messenger
on earth and could not be ignored. There
was a hound, too. It had barked once, with a voice
like molten iron poured over gravel. It would be
big and male and Valerius, who would have sworn
to any man, Longinus included, that he had not
taken note of it, bet himself that it would be
brindle, with a white ear. A white left ear. In the
days before a battle as big as the one that was
coming, he could recall his ghosts and not fear
them. Like a man afraid of heights who stands on
a cliff edge, he did so, deliberately, watching the
ebb and flow of his own terror, held at bay by
the necessities of war. It gave the illusion of
control and he was happy for it.

Longinus had ridden a stride or two ahead.
'They're baiting a bull,' he said.

'Obviously. The question is what kind of bull
and what are they baiting it with? More important,
will it win? If it's going to gore
Umbricius, we'll put money on it and leave.'

'It's too young to win. He's going to kill it, but
not yet.' The Thracian spun his horse on its hocks.
'Julius, it's a red roan. It's not white. You don't
have to be here.'

Longinus had been invited to join the ranks of
the bull-worshippers and had declined;
his Thracian gods could not be supplanted. His
knowledge of Mithras came through hearsay and
he had never once asked Valerius for confirmation
or refutation of the many rumours. He knew the 
raven brand intimately, and the other marks that
had come later when Valerius had risen above
the lowest rank, but he had never once asked their
source nor their meaning.

Valerius said, 'It doesn't have to be white
the god's. That's a myth.'

A crowd gathered at the gateway. To a man they
were Gauls and Valerius had trained with at least 
a third of them on the Rhine and fought at their 
side in the invasion battle. Those who had begun
together were loath to part and kept themselves separate
from the incomers sent to replace those
who had died. Valerius, whom they had once
regarded with affection as a luck-bringer, they
now saw as a traitor for having moved to other
ranks.

He pushed the Crow-horse through the heave of
bodies and men grudged him room. He had
reached the gate when a high whine began to
sound in his ears, like the hum of swarming
drones. A pressure built in his head and on his
brand in a way that had not happened before.
Feeling attacked, he looked about him for the
source. He was in the land of dreamers and had
not guarded against it, not knowing how. He saw
nothing and no-one and the whine became louder
and was clearly only in his head. From
the field, the bull wrecked the earth with its horns
and then lifted its eyes to meet Valerius'. The
whine became a whistle that passed beyond hearing
and came back again and it dawned on him
slowly - stupidly slowly - that this was what he
had prayed for these past years and not felt: the
genuine presence of his god.

He had no idea what to do. Four years' training
in the cellars of Camulodunum had taught him the
litanies and the rituals; he could fast and pray and
had, once, acted in the induction of new acolytes.
He knew the songs that told of Mithras' birth
from untouched rock and of his acts as he walked
the earth, but he had no notion of how to act in
his presence.

He prayed; he could do nothing else. The bull
accepted his prayer and transformed it. Valerius
fumbled to hold on to the feel of it.

A man - Umbricius - shouted a challenge and
the moment fell apart, sickeningly. From the west
of the field, a young hound yammered, close to
hysterics. From the gate, Valerius could see that it
was neither broken-coated nor brindle and had no
white ear. Its pelt was the smooth blue of newly
chipped flint and its ears were round-tipped like
those of the hound carved on the altar on the wall
of the Mithraeum beneath the first centurion's
house in Camulodunum. The hound on the altar
drank the blood of the slain bull. In the field outwith
the fortress of the XXth legion in
the high mountain country of the Cornovii,
this hound was trying its utmost to drink the
blood of a Gaulish actuary, or at least to spill it.

Umbricius crouched with his back to the gate, a
dozen paces into the field. The paddock was a
small one, set aside for the best of the youngstock
bulls, those too old to be kept in large groups
without fighting but not yet old enough to
challenge the prime bulls for the right to serve the
cows and sire next season's young. A dry stone
wall surrounded the perimeter, high as a horse's
stifle. Oaks shaded it, with trunks so broad three
men could not link arms round them. Wild rose
grew in tangles between, dripping waxen hips
bright as the spilled blood of the sacrifice.

The gloss on the hide of the young bull facing
Umbricius was of a deeper red than the rosehips
and it was shaded through with white at the
shoulders and rump. He was proud and it was
easy to see why he had been singled out to be kept
entire, not cut with the rest and salted for winter
beef for the legion. His horns swept out and
forward and the tips were clean; the bull, or one
who cared for him, had not let them catch hair
and leaf-litter and mud about the tips. He
bellowed and his voice was the god's, speaking
from the ageless heavens. A man only had to
interpret it and he could ride the world.

Valerius had no idea what it meant.

Longinus, whose gods spoke in voices other
than a bull's, was at Valerius' left. He said, 'The
hound will break free from the boy if Umbricius
doesn't get out of there. If it kills an officer of the
auxiliary, they'll kill the hound and hang the boy.
Umbricius isn't worth that.' They had never
spoken of hounds and what they might mean in
the past history of either man; there had never
been the need. It was too late now, but perhaps
still not necessary.

Valerius lifted a hand to shade his eyes from the
late sun. A youth held the hound. In looking
earlier, Valerius had failed to see that. He was not
an exceptional youth in any way; his hair was
dark, and he was of middling height and gangling.
Nothing linked him to the god except that he was
kneeling on his left knee with his arms about the
hound.

Something metallic flashed in the air. The bull
flinched and bellowed. The hound howled. The
boy shouted something in the language of the
Cornovii. Alone among the tribes, they
worshipped the horned god before the Mother.
The boy's eyes met Valerius' and begged for help.
Uncounted others had done so in the steadings of
the Trinovantes and he had ignored them, had
slain their sisters, had hanged the ones who
begged, silently or aloud. Then, the god's breath
had not whined in his ears nor the bull stared him
down.

For the god, not for a dark-haired youth and his
hound, Valerius pushed the Crow-horse close to
the gate and shouted, 'Umbricius, leave the bull
alone.'

The Gaul was twice armed. A short throwing
knife glinted in either hand. He was the son of a
fisherman; where other men, given the right knife
and the right pacing and enough practice, could
throw a knife and sometimes hit a target,
Umbricius could throw any knife and place the
point to within a finger's width of his aiming
place. Three other short, wide blades hung from a
belt slung over his shoulder. He was known to carry nine, the number of luck. Of the remaining four,
three lay on the turf around the bull. The last one
thrown jutted, vibrating, from one massive shoulder.
The gloss of the beast's coat hid the blood.

'Umbricius, leave it. That's an order.'

Umbricius was only an actuary, albeit on double pay. A decurion of any troop outranked him. The
first decurion of another wing ranked so far above
him that only a prefect could call back any order
he gave. To ignore him was a flogging offence.
Umbricius ignored him.

The gate was closed and there was no room for
the pied horse to jump it. Gauls crowded close and
none made any move to support the Thracians.
Somewhere, far back, Valerius' troop had
gathered but they were too few and too far away,
and anyway none of them could force a way
through to the gate. Valerius and Longinus stood
alone within a sea of Gauls. Men had died in
similar circumstances and the threat of decimation
had not brought forth the names of their killers.
Valerius doubted whether either Scapula or Corvus would choose to slaughter ten men in a
hundred of their foremost cavalry wing on the eve
of a battle against warriors renowned for their
use of the horse.

'Get Corvus.' Valerius said it without turning, in Thracian. The whine in his ears altered the sound
of his voice.

Longinus said, 'I'm not leaving you.'

'You are. I order it. If you ignore that, I'll have
you flogged with the Gaul. Do it.'

There was a breath's silence, and room to feel
shock and regret and to know that, in this
company, it was not possible to take back the
words. In Thracian, Valerius said, 'Just go. Please.'

Longinus saluted, rigidly. His chestnut mare
backed away from the gate. The Gauls were more
willing to let her go than they had been to let her
in.

Valerius turned the Crow-horse sideways to the
gate. 'Umbricius, if I have to come into that field
and get you out, you'll regret it more than anything
else in your life.'

'The bull is mine. The boy insulted me.'

Valerius found suddenly that he liked the youth.
He pitched his voice to carry. 'Why? Did you try
to take him and he refused you? Anyone with eyes
in their head would refuse you. He should be given
half a year's advanced pay and offered a place in
the wing for displaying uncommon good sense.'

The men about him were Gauls and he knew
them well. In the press of bodies, men sniggered.
Umbricius coloured, unflatteringly. 'I did not'

'Really? The bull then? I don't think even
gouging its eyes out will make it any more
amenable. Face it, you're going to spend tonight
alone, and all the nights after this until one of
Caratacus' spears finds the dried goat turd that is
your heart and breaks it open. Now get out of that
field. If you go now, while Longinus is away, no-one need know that you were lax in following an
order.'

It was said for the men closest to him because
not all of them favoured Umbricius and Valerius
had, after all, brought the horses over the barrier
at the salmon-trap and kept them alive. Talking,
he had given them time to remember that, and to
find that they did not want to hate him. They
grinned and, when Valerius slid down from the
Crow-horse, they crowded less close. He vaulted
the gate, neatly, and was applauded. The hound
bayed at him. The bull slashed the turf with its
horns. Valerius prayed to the god that the beast
knew he came to help, not to injure.

His presence changed the balance in the field.
Before, Umbricius had had a clear run to the safety .
of the gate if the bull charged. With Valerius
blocking his escape, the Gaul was trapped between
two foes, both of whom wanted to kill
him - three if he counted the hound.

However much one hated him, one could never
say of Umbricius that he lacked courage. He
grinned and drew two more knives from his chest
belt and began to juggle them, flashily. He, too,
was applauded. Gauls liked excellence and, if
he was not beautiful, Umbricius could create a
measure of beauty with his knives.

In the juggling, the Gaul took a single pace back
and where he had stood between Valerius and the
bull was now clear space. With his eyes on his
knives, he said, 'If the bull kills you, will they
decimate the natives, do you think?'

'Maybe, after they have hanged you.' The bee-whine
in Valerius' ears made it difficult to think,
more difficult still to remember the exactitudes of
a language he had not spoken regularly for half a
lifetime and had made some effort in the past two
years to forget. He tried, feeling for the words,
raising his voice so that it carried over the keening
of the flint-pelted hound to the youth who held it.
In the dialect of the dreamers that was common
throughout the tribes, he said, 'Take your hound
and leave. I will keep the horned one safe.'

He felt the cut of the boy's stare. The Cornovii
worshipped the god as stag, not as bull, but they
would know of Mithras and perhaps believe that
one god or the other would keep the beast alive.
Valerius spoke again, remembering more words.
'Go now. The hound is in danger if you keep him
here. If you care for him, you must take him to
safety.'

A boy will care for the welfare of his hound
when his own pride might require him to remain
in danger. Peripherally, Valerius saw the youth
clasp his hound closer and speak to it. The urgent
keening ceased. The humming in Valerius' ears did
not, which was a pity but could not be altered. It
had only come once before and then only briefly,
when he had gathered the Crow-horse to ride him
over the barrier at the salmon-trap. He had
thought then that it signalled his imminent death
and that only luck and the god had prevented it.
He prayed again for the same luck, or for the god
to keep safe his soul if he died. On the western
edge of the field, the boy began to move towards
the gate, dragging his hound with him.

A knife danced in an arc and sliced across the
forehead of the bull. It bellowed and turned
towards Valerius, who was closest. Horns as long
as a man's arm gouged the turf, flicking black soil
to the treetops. Its eyes were dark as walnuts and
too soft for true rage. The red-roan hide blackened
around them, smudgily, as if one of the officers'
wives had applied paint in haste and the rain had
smeared it. Valerius had long enough to see that
and for part of him to want Longinus to see it and
to share the joke- before the eyes dipped and the
horns became horizontal and the bull charged. It
was not at all too soft for rage.

The world divided and became two; at once
impossibly fast and infinitely slow. In each world,
Valerius both met his death and avoided it. In the
slower, he noted small things: the change in
the timbre of the god's voice in his ear, so that it
became lower and-calmer and was a pleasanter
prelude to death; the sudden flurry of crows in the upper branches of the oaks when he had not
realized any birds were watching; the tight jingle
of armour as men in repose came suddenly to
attention in the unexpected presence of an officer;
the sound of Corvus' voice, shouting.

'Ban! In the name of all the gods, get out of
there!'

It was the wrong name spoken in the wrong
language and with a depth of care he had not
heard for four years. Shock spun the two worlds
impossibly far apart. Longinus' voice followed
and could not heal the rift. 'Julius! Move yourself,
damn you.'

He was already moving. In the faster world, the
one in which Valerius' body moved without
the care of his heart, a bull sent by Mithras came
to kill him with the speed of a galloping horse.
Because he had fought daily for years with a
horse that moved with the whip of a snake, his
body carried him sideways and down and rolled
him like a tumbler to come up on his feet beside
Umbricius. As in the best of battles, terror fired
him, raising him up. He came to his feet with
his sword in his hand and only the presence of
Corvus stopped him from burying it in Umbricius.
The Gaul saw it and lost the last vestige of
colour. Valerius laughed. 'Run for the trees. I
wager your life against mine that the bull can outrun
us both.' They were a spear's throw from
safety. It was not an impossible distance, only
improbable. Umbricius ran. Valerius, still
caught in two worlds, did not, but backed away
slowly.

The bull reached the gate. If the men crowding
outside had been calm with it, or had given the
youth time to reach it, the beast might have
stopped, but the gathered Gauls were afraid and
excited and they stabbed at the great head
and heaving roan hide with sword-tips and
knives and the god that was not a god turned back
into the field and charged again.

The youth was running, dragging his blue-pelted hound with him. He tripped on a tree root
and let go of the collar. Caught in a field with two
men and a rage-filled bull, the hound saw only
that the one man it had come so recently to hate
was running and could be hunted.

In the pantheon of the god's beasts, only the
hound is faster than the bull. Valerius saw it
coming and knew that in this hunt, he was not the
prey. In the slow world, in which his mind saw clearly, he saw the death of a Gaul and the death
after it, inevitably more slowly, of a hound and a
dark-haired youth who had knelt as did the god.
In the fast world he stepped sideways and spun
hard to his right and his sword sliced, back-handed, across the throat of the running hound.

The bull was only fractionally slower and it did
not discriminate between one foe and the other. In
the moment of the hound's death, while his slo
heart was seeking the words of a death-rite he had
not heard spoken in over twenty years, Valerius
saw the sky turn from lilac-grey to red-roan and
then to black. In that same slow world, the god for
whom that death-rite had no meaning took over
his body, filling it. Without any will on his part,
Valerius pressed himself flat to the turf and rolled
sideways along his length as a child might roll 
down a snowy slope in winter, for the joy of it.

The god did not fill him with joy, but with
splintering light and a unique, inexpressible pain
that burned across his back on the side opposite
the brand. Spurred by the power of hurt, Valerius
thrust his hands down and launched up and
forwards and where there had been turf and trees
and the calling of crows was a stone wall, over
which a god-filled man could vault as easily as he
might vault onto a horse in the heart of battle. The
bull collided with the wall behind him and
knocked the top third of it down. The god kept
the stones from striking Valerius' head. He lay on
his back in longer grass and-felt the god leave him,
taking his breath with it. Lying very still, unable to
breathe, fighting to hold his vision clear when the
world came at him in tunnels and was dark, what
concerned him most was that he could still not
remember the words of the death-rite for the
hound.

Longinus reached him first. A hawk's eyes filled
the tunnels of light. Ungentle hands grasped his
shoulders. A raw voice said, 'Breathe, god damn
you. Julius, breathe.'

A different voice said, no more gently, 'He can't.
The bull smacked him across the back. If he's
lucky, he's winded. If he's not lucky, he's got a
back full of broken ribs and he'll never breathe
again. Let me look at him.'

It was into Corvus' care that he fainted.

XII.

They kept him in the cool and the dark for five
days.

For the first three of those days, in delirium, he
grieved over the death of a blue-pelted hound with
rounded ears who had not drunk the blood of the
bull. In his sleep, he strove endlessly to remember
the rite of the battle-dead heard once in childhood
and long forgotten. He searched the pathways of
the dreams for the one to whom the rite was
dedicated and did not find her. He railed against
rejection and forgot that that god was not the one
to whom he had given his life and dedicated his
death. Later, remembering, he hunted the caverns
of his soul and the uncertain vessel of his body for
the lost light of the god that had so blinded him 
in the presence of the bull. He did not find that,
either.

We ride to kill Caratacus. On the third day,
towards evening, he remembered that. The
thought levered him up and he would have risen
had not a long arm reached out and pushed him
back.

'Not yet, I think. Not unless you want Longinus
to lose your salary as well as his own.'

'Longinus? What has he- Theophilus? What in
the god's name are you doing here?'

Theophilus had been left behind in
Camulodunum. The world was not, then, as
Valerius remembered it. He collapsed onto the bed
and spent the next several moments striving to
breathe again through the hammering pain in his
back thus created. His heart smashed into his ribs
and the pulse soared in his ears like a high
mountain waterfall. Over the noise of it, he could
see Theophilus smiling. That was a good sign.
Theophilus rarely smiled when death was near.

When he could hear properly, the physician
said, 'You don't change, do you? I rode relay
horses for a day and a half to get to you. Strangely,
I had expected you to thank me, or at least to pay
attention to what I might have to say.'

'Thank you.' Valerius could breathe again, if
painfully. He pushed himself up on one elbow.
'Are you telling me we're not in Camulodunum?'

'We are not. We're in the fortress of the
Twentieth legion in the shadow of Caratacus'
mountains, guests of the legate and of his
eminence, the Governor Scapula, who has also, as
I understand it, placed a significant quantity of
gold on your speedy recovery. More important
from your point of view, he holds the army awaiting
your presence. That's not the official reason, of
course. They say they are waiting until Caratacus
has committed himself to a single mountain pass
for his trap, but I strongly suspect that the day you
can mount your Crow-horse, we will find
Caratacus also has committed. You are considered
lucky by the men. Even the Gauls will fight better
in your presence, however much money they have
lost by your being there. No commander will
march leaving his luck behind if he can avoid it.'

The quality of the light told him it was evening.
No longer searching for the god, Valerius mapped
out the physical margins of his body and the pain
it held. He breathed in deeply and exhaled with
vigour. Neither was unbearable and, with some
testing, he found that if he did it slowly, the world
did not come at him through a tunnel. We ride to
kill Caratacus. He slid his legs to the side of the
bed.

'I can ride now. We should be moving. The longer we wait, the more likely they are to draw
other warriors to their cause.'

'No. That is, perhaps, yes, you will fight better
than you might otherwise have done, but no, you
are not yet fit to ride.'

'I may be bruised, Theophilus, but I have no
broken ribs. I can ride with a bruised back. I
won't notice it once the fighting starts, I promise
you.'

'I'm sure you won't. I never cease to be amazed
at the wounds men can bear in battle, but you are
not here alone in the legate's private lodgings
simply to care for the state of your back.'

The physician pulled a stool to the bed.
Exhaustion showed in the lines around his eyes
and the cracked and reddened skin about his nose.
Theophilus always developed a head cold when he
had been working too hard. The old caduceus in
apple wood hung from his neck; he had lost the
gold one soon after it had been given him. He
stroked the rising snakes a moment, thinking, and
then stretched to the foot of the bed and brought
up a beaker. 'Drink this.'

'Not if it's poppy. I don't want that.'

'And I wouldn't give it to you. Where you have
been, poppy would be a hindrance, not a help.'

'But this will help?' The infusion smelled of
plantain and cow parsley. He drank a little. His
tongue shrivelled. It was more bitter, by far, than
the poppy. He remembered something like it
from his youth. He had slept for a day and a night
then. 'What will this do that time and rest will
not?'

'It may keep you from talking in your sleep.'

'Ah.' That had not happened for a very long
time. 'In Latin?'

'Sometimes. Sometimes in Thracian. Most often
not. Some of the time, when you speak Latin, you
talk of the god, or to the god. It's not something
the men should hear.'

'No. Thank you.' He may have been considered
lucky for his actions with the bull but an officer
who raves to and of his god in his sleep can
become its opposite very quickly. An unlucky
decurion was a liability who was likely to find
himself dead in the thick of battle with no-one
afterwards able to say who struck the blow.

He drank the rest of the draught, feeling the
bitterness drag at his cheeks and his tongue.
The after-taste was more of elder and not unpleasant. Slowly, the fog in his mind cleared,
leaving isolated memories as rocks in a placid sea;
Longinus and his raw concern, a boy grieving a
slain hound, Corvus.

Corvus, who had called a name in a language both men should have forgotten.

Valerius asked, 'Who brought me here, away
from the men?'
He had been silent longer than he thought.
Theophilus was half asleep, leaning on one elbow, his eyes fixed elsewhere, his breathing thick
through his fuddled sinuses. His head came roun
slowly, like an owl's, and, owl-like, he blinked.
Presently he said, 'As I understand it, the prefect of
the Gaulish horse gave the order that you be
brought here. One assumes that he consulted with
the legate and the governor first. Longinus
Sdapeze is the one who carried you in, as he is also
the one who has sat with you throughout. I think
it is safe to say he heard all that you said and not
all of it was of the god. Sleep opens you. You
speak to those for whom you care most. They ar
not always the same as those who care most for
you. I sent your friend away to sleep when I got
here, else he would be here still.'

Your friend. At what cost to them both? 'I
should thank him.'

'You should. At the very least, you should
accede to the timetable on which he has gambled
both your salaries.'

'Both our ... oh, bloody hell. He'll be betting
against the Gauls, I suppose? Yes, I thought so.
What has he said I will do?'

'The Gauls believe it will be a good half a
month before you can ride. Your Thracian friend believes you will be on your horse by the first day
of the new moon.' The physician dragged a hand down the length of his face. It rearranged his
sleeplessness. 'You have three days in which to mend. I strongly suggest you petition your god to give you some peace and between us we can have you fit to fight your nemesis.'

It was not Mithras that disturbed Valerius' peace,
but his lack. For a further night and a day, he lay
on the pillows searching within for the places the
god had touched. Sleep came and went and he
spoke less in it, Theophilus said, and more often in
Latin or Thracian than the languages of his youth.
In the waking times, he drank and ate what he was
given and lay still, feeling dry and hollow and
empty with nothing remaining of the high whine
in his ear or the scintillating light that had so
blinded him in the presence of the bull, but only
the dullness of old pain that spread out with the
blackened bruise across his back.

He thought of Corvus and, because of that, of
Caratacus; love and hate were too easily entwined.

Time fragmented and when it came together, he
was on a headland in a storm and two men were
washed up by the sea. In his dreaming, it was
impossible to tell which was loved and which hated. He wanted to kill both for their separate
betrayals and could not. He planned a battle in
which the one was killed and the other's life saved
by the actions of a decurion on a pied horse and
knew that at least one part of that had happened
already and the world was no different for it. He
tried to think of other things.

When Theophilus came to feed him, he asked,
'Did they kill the bull?'

'No. They might have done if you had died but
the legate here is anxious to keep the natives sweet
and you had already slain their hound. In any case
- don't look at me like that, I know why you did
it - in any case, the first centurion of the Twentieth
is branded for the god, and the Mithraists among
the men would not have seen it die, not after you
had spoken the god's name in its presence and
were seen to lay your hand on its brow before you
performed the bull-leap to escape it.' 

'Did I do that?'

'Longinus says not, but the myth that surrounds
your life says that you did and those of us who care
for you are not inclined publicly to deny it. The senior tribune of the Twentieth wishes to speak to
you on matters concerning the bull and the infinite
sun. I have told him you are still with the god. If you
are well enough, I could tell him otherwise.'

The tribune of the XXth was Valerius' current
Father under the Sun, the highest rank before the
god in the province. Only the governor would
have been higher and the governor was not given
to the god. The tribune was grey and dry and had
spent altogether-too much time in the company of
humourless men, so that the life had leached out
of him. The staff and a sickle were inked on his
wrists as open proclamation of his rank before the
god. Valerius should have been honoured by his
presence.

'I am honoured,' he said.

The tribune had tight, grey lips. He pressed
them together. 'No. You were honoured three days
ago by the touch of the god; we merely act to
show our recognition of it. I am come to tell you that you are now ranked Lion under the Sun
and that the necessary rites have been spoken in
your name. When you are well enough, you may
offer your own prayers at the altar. Meanwhile
know that the god is well pleased with his son.'

He was not sure of that. The god, having
blinded him, had departed utterly and showed no
inclination to return. Without his, presence,
Valerius' rank and grade within the temple were
tokens only, a means to advance a career that had
already reached its zenith. He was already foremost
decurion of his wing. It had long ago been
made clear that he would never be raised to the rank of prefect; that was reserved for equestrians
of Roman birth. Unless Valerius wished to leave
the cavalry for the legions - which he did not there
was no higher rank he could attain.
Somewhere in the jumble of his memories he
heard his younger self and then Corvus.

I believed it would be constructive in the
development of my career. 

I'm sure it will.

He had believed it then, or told himself so.
Now, he knew only that there were three men
permitted to hold the grade of Lion within the
temples of the province and that for him to rise to
that position now meant that one of them was
dead. He wondered, briefly and without interest,
which it was who had met his end and how. It was
possible he was expected to ask. Certainly, the
tribune was awaiting something.

Valerius nodded, attempting a measure of grace.

'Thank you. If it's possible, I would spend time
with the god before we ride to battle. I was told
there is a cave here that is the god's, not a cellar. Is
it true?'

'It is. The mountain is like a sponge for holes
and caves. The god showed one as his own.'

'May I go to it? Alone?'

It was not a usual question. The tribune reflected, touching his tattoos. 'You may.' He
gave, in brief, directions as to how it might be
found.

Valerius inclined his head. 'Once again, I am
honoured.'

'The god honours us all.'

The tribune left. Someone else took his place at
the bedside. Expecting Theophilus, Valerius said
'I need to go out. If I walk on my own two feet,
will Longinus still hold his bet?'

'I will.'

The Thracian stood at the foot of the bed. He
was more rested than Theophilus, but not by
much. His stag-brown hair had been washed and
he had shaved too close; the skin of his cheeks was
unusually pink and a thread of blood marred his
throat. He moved as if he might step forward and
then stopped, cautiously. He was not usually a
cautious man.

Valerius' thoughts were still with the grey
tribune. He pulled them back. Between him and
the man at the foot of the bed was a gulf which
threatened to become unbridgeable. It was harder
to smile than he had thought it would be. He
made the effort. 'I could spend the rest of my life
thanking you for bringing me here and apologizing
for whatever I said in the worlds beyond sleep.
I will do it if you want, but I think you would tire
of it quickly.'

'I might, but then a life is a long time.' The
Thracian rubbed the side of his nose. His hands
rested lightly on the bed end, the nails pared back
to fighting length. He looked down at them and
then up again. 'Were you thinking to try?'

'Not from this distance.' The hesitancy affected
them both. Valerius reached out a hand. The relief
he felt when it was grasped was greater than he
had expected.

It was, after all, only two steps from the end of
the bed to its head, not an insurmountable space.
Longinus crossed them and stood at his side, still
holding his hand. A little light-headed, Valerius
said, 'I don't break, I think, if touched.'

'Do you not? Theophilus seemed to think you
might. If he's right, we lose both our salaries.' 

'Then we had better be careful.'

Longinus was not Corvus, but it was, after all,
overwhelmingly good to see him. They were careful. Valerius did not break. The night was not
exceptional, but it was good.

XIII.

The god's cave was partway up a mountain
steeper than any Valerius had ever climbed. He
walked up with Longinus before dawn, in the
darkest part of the night. Taking no torch, they
found their way by the thin light of the stars and
a Thracian facility for navigation in the dark.
They climbed the paths slowly, as hunters might,
or scouts spying on enemy lines, taking care that
they were neither followed nor overlooked.

The penalty for revealing the cave's location had
not been made explicit but a man may die in battle
for many reasons and profaning another man's. god is not the least of them. They had discussed it,
briefly, in the hospital ward before leaving.
Longinus had asked, 'Are you sure you want me to
come?'

Valerius had paused in dressing. 'I am, but if
you'd rather not I don't mind. I don't believe you
would offend the god by your presence, only that
men will protect what they feel they own.'

'No-one owns what is the gods'.'

'I know.'

Neither questioned the other's reason for going; for four years they had fought nothing more taxing
than poorly armed men and women, had
slaughtered children and pregnant mothers and
grandmothers whose best and only weapon was a toothless curse. Faced with their first real battle since the disaster of the Eceni salmon-trap, they
were not the only ones from the legions and the auxiliary to seek out a sacred place from which to
watch the sunrise. Over the past days, many men
had gone out, each to make his peace with his god
alone or in the company of the one for whom he cared most. Such a thing was obvious; it was not necessary to speak of it.

They were both battle-fit and each had grown
amongst people for whom moving silently in foreign territory was a skill valued above many
others. They climbed through bracken, over rocks, through heather and across mountain streams and the best of the enemy's scouts would have been
hard pressed to find them.

The cave mouth was narrow and tall and set
back a spear's cast away from a white water river
and the waterfall it became, flowing over the edge
of a cliff. In his childhood, Valerius had lived
within sight of a waterfall less than the height of a
child and had thought it infinitely vast. The
contrast here would have been laughable were it
not so overwhelming. The crash of the torrent
numbed the mind almost as much as the sight.
Valerius could readily imagine that, heard from
inside, magnified by the echoing walls, the sound might easily become the voice of the god. New
initiates, fuddled by lack of food and water, heads
thick with incense, would be astounded when the
blindfold was removed that had also covered their
ears. The noise would enhance the brightness of
the god's light, drawing them further out of themselves
as the brand-iron pressed in. He would have
liked to have been introduced to the god first in a
cave. There might have been more chance of
meeting him.

There was light now, from the eastern horizon,
enough to see the hazel tree that drooped its nuts
across the entrance and to pick out the jars of
honey and small sheaves of corn that had been left
around the cave mouth. A great many men had
come in the last few days to offer gifts directly to
the god.

Longinus said, 'It's darker in there than it is out
here. There's no star light.'

'I brought one of Theophilus' dipped-tallow
candles. We can light it when we're out of sight.'

'You want me to come in?'

'Unless the god tells us otherwise.'

A sharp-edged boulder lay across the threshold
and must be climbed to reach the entrance. The
mouth was narrower than the width of their
shoulders so that, having scrambled across the
guardian, they had to turn and edge crabwise
along the first few paces of a long corridor.
Presently, it angled left and opened and they could
walk straight and then side by side. The floor
sloped downwards and the ceiling came to meet it
so that they stooped and then crouched and then
crawled and then slid, belly down on rough stone,
feeling their way forward in a darkness more
absolute than night. It went on longer than any
sane man would have wanted. Valerius tried to
imagine the grey tribune doing this in the robes of
the Father and failed. If the offerings had not been
left at the entrance, he might have believed he had
the wrong cave.

Behind him, Longinus said, 'I don't relish going
backwards up here if there is no room anywhere
to turn round.'

'There's room. I can feel air.'

He felt air and then he felt no floor and  no
ceiling and had no idea how great was the fall
ahead of him. He stopped, sweating. Still crawling, Longinus crashed into his heels. Valerius said
'Stop.'

'You should light the candle.'

Valerius lit the candle. It took him longer than it
might have done. His hands did not yet answer
fully the commands of his mind and the pitched
tinder was not completely dry. He knelt, nursing
the flame, and so was not first to see what was
there to be seen.

'Julius, look up.' Longinus spoke in Thracian,
as he did at night, or in battle or at moments of
strain.

Lifting the flame, Valerius looked. Ten years of
responsible leadership and some forewarning of
the ways of the god prevented him from dropping
it again. With shock-numbed fingers he held it
over his head and stared.

Light came at him from too many directions. In
the first moments, it was overwhelming, as the
god's light of the cellar should have been but
rarely was. With time, his eyes picked out detail
amidst the blinding gold; he was facing a still lake,
the surface of which spun back the candlelight as
if it had been laced with oil and fired. In the walls
behind and above, in the soaring roof of the
cavern, the sodden, dripping rock gave off a
rippling wall of light, brighter than stars. If a
priest had spent a lifetime implanting diamonds in
the rock, it could not have shone more, and yet
there were no diamonds, only water, and the fire
of the single flame. As Valerius turned, still
staring, so the sheen turned with him, flaring as
living light.

'Mithras...' He breathed the god's name with
true reverence. 'He could have been born in a cave
such as this.'

They were too close to the mystery for one not
of the god. 'I'll wait outside,' Longinus said.

Valerius could have argued and did not. He heard
the slip of wool on rock and a scuff of boots on the
wall of the tunnel and the Thracian was gone.

Left alone with his god, Valerius was slow to
move. The lake spread before him, mirror-still and
gilded with fire, and he watched the flowing
undulations of his breath as the candlelight spread
across it in waves. The dreams of three days still
held him and he saw things in the fire-mirror that
he had thought only to see in the dark of his own
mind. Caradoc, son of Cunobelin, washed ashore
on the Eceni coast and this time, as he was hauled
from the sea, his hair was a pallid red and his face
was that of his brother Amminios and he rose to
his feet laughing and drew a sword from the
sheath of his own right thigh and, with it, killed
the men, women and children who had come to
rescue him, ending with a yellow-haired Belgic
slave boy named Iccius.

Because this was not a new dream, and years of
repetition had taught Valerius some measure of
control over the outcome, the boy Iccius did not
rise from the bloody sand and come to kill him,
but instead lay where he was and withered to skin
and bone as did the bodies of the tribal dead when
left on the death platforms for their gods. Because,
too, he was awake and not sleeping and he knew
Amminios to be dead, Valerius bent his mind to
the smiling half-ghost in front of him. He painted
out the straggled red hair and replaced it with
corn-gold, made the amber eyes the colour of
clouds and made less of the nose. Only the smile
he could not change, and the affirmation of
treachery. In the dreams, the ghosts were voiceless.
In the mirrored fire, the voice he loathed most in
the world said, We nearly won. Think how
different the world would be if none had emerged
alive from the valley of the Heron's Foot.

'I thought none had.'

As you were meant to. Would you have joined
the legions if you had known your sister lived? 

Valerius was in the place of the god. Here,
images sent by the god could ask questions that no
man, dead or alive, would have dared ask and he,
sworn to the god, must own an answer he would
have drunk any amount of wine to avoid.

'No.' 

So. And you would not have come to Mithras.
Is it your loss?

He was in the place of the god. What could he
say? 'It is not my loss.'

Amminios was no longer Amminios, nor even
Caradoc. Where he had been, the god knelt on the
placid lake with his arms round the neck of
the hound. The cape fell about his shoulders,
drinking in the fire and giving it out again,
brighter. Elsewhere, in other places, a bull gored
the earth and a loose-lipped serpent drank blood
that was not yet spilled. The god's eyes burned
him and Valerius knew himself seen; each part
of him flayed from the rest and spread open before
a gaze that encompassed eternities.

'I would rather have known she lived,' he said.
'Even if I had died trying to reach her, it would
have been better.'

The youth in the cape ran long fingers down the
muzzle of the hound, thoughtfully. He smiled a
little. Honesty becomes you.

'I would not lie to you.' 

But only to yourself.

'Sometimes it is necessary.'

Perhaps. Do you hate him enough to kill him
with your own hand? 

'Who?'

Caradoc. The one whose death you dream even
in the presence of your god.

'He betrayed me. He betrayed us all. For that I
would see him dead, yes, by any means.' 

Only for that?

'Is it not enough?'

Perhaps. There was a space, in which all possibilities opened and only some of them closed
again. If his death was balanced by your death, so
that you died when he died, would you still do it?

'Yes.' The word was said before he had time to
think. Thinking, he found it still true.

And if the cost instead was the life of one you
love, what then?

He had thought himself beyond panic and was
not. 'Corvus?'

A god's silence is a frightening thing.

'Longinus?'

Perhaps. Your love binds more than you allow.
Think on that before you kill. Or choose not to.

The hound was gone, melted into the mirror.
The kneeling god became less clear and less clear
until all that was left was the flicker of a dying
flame on water. At the end, his voice came over the
dark. What will fire your life, Valerius, when the flame of vengeance is gone?

'It is all I have.'

The god laughed. It rang off stone and came
back again, echoing. A bull bellowed, dying.
Another voice than the god's said, Then find more.

He could have stood for hours, or days. Falling
candle wax burned his hand. He flinched and the
wilting fire-mirror shattered and spat. Molten
light spread across the floor and walls of the
cavern and settled back to the lake, which was still
again, and only barely lit. It came to him, standing
still and cold, that the bull which he had seen die
three times over had not been white, but red roan.
He did not understand why that should be so.

A long time ago, Theophilus had warned him
against spending too long in worlds beyond his
own lest it become impossible to return. The
physician had been speaking of the nightmares
and the waking dreams, but the danger was as real
here as anywhere. The pull of the water was that
of a lodestone, with his body the iron. Senses other
than sight and sound told him that the lake was
not shallow. He could walk in and keep walking
and in twenty paces he would have joined the god
and would know for himself all possible destinies
of those left alive.

'Valerius?' Longinus' voice came through the
tunnel, warped by distance and the convoluted
rock.

He stepped back from the water's edge. 'Soon.
I'll be out soon.'

He could not leave yet. Turning his back on the
lake, he used the poor light of the candle to
explore the remainder of the cavern. On the wall
opposite the lake he found the altar, chiselled out
of virgin rock, and the place behind it for the ninefold
torches and the incense burners that would
make the ceremonies of initiation more than
simply rituals held in the dark. Beyond it, in the
wall opposite the tunnel, he found a tall, narrow
opening. The interior was blacker than the cavern
had been. The air flowed from the larger
cavern inwards, pushing him forward. Holding
the guttering flame ahead of him, Valerius
squeezed himself sideways and stepped into the
entrance.

NO. 

The word pressed into his ears from the centre
of his head. The breath blocked in his chest and
clenched tight at his throat. His heart crashed to a
halt and restarted. It was not at all the voice of
a kneeling youth.

He took a step back and could breathe again.
The fall of his feet sounded faint. Step by slow
step, he backed away until his heels pressed
against the wall through which he had first
entered. Sometime before he reached it, the candle
went out. The tunnel lay to his left and he found
it after some searching.

Too fast for comfort, too slowly for peace, he
crawled and crouched and rose and walked into
walls and past them and out into a mountain
morning where the air was wet with the spray of
white water and a buzzard mewed like a gull.

Longinus was waiting, not far from the
entrance. After a while, without moving, he said,
'Did you see your own death? Or mine?'

'No.'

'Then come with me and sit by the water.
Whatever it was, it will pass.'

Three days later, on the first day of the new moon,
the decurion of the first troop, the First Thracian
Cavalry, was seen to be riding his pied horse in the
exercise yard. His friend, the standard-bearer of
the first troop, collected his winnings and was seen
to be exceedingly cheerful. On the following
morning, a scout's report was read verbatim to
the assembled troops. It described, in detail, the
position of the rebel leader, Caratacus, the numbers
of his warriors and the reinforcements he might
reasonably expect to receive from other tribes.

The governor, Scapula, added afterwards his
own assessment of the likely tactics of the enemy,
based on his position and strength. At the end, as
Theophilus had predicted, he gave the order to
move out, with immediate effect.

XIV.

The harvest in the western mountains and on
Mona was gathered more speedily that year than
any of the eight that had come before it. At the
end, the granaries of the tribes were not full - too
few had been present for sowing and fewer had
been spared in the intervening months to weed - 
but there was sufficient to ensure that none among
the people should starve, whatever the outcome
of the war. In the days after, children began to
gather cob nuts and field fungi and small, bitter
crab apples that would sweeten by spring. The
elderly ground woad into powder and mixed it
with the juice of pulped bramble berries for dye
and brewed ale that would keep them warm
through the winter. Warriors ate and slept and
loved and honed their weapons in the company
of their children. The dreamers sought the word of
the gods. Scouts reported the arrival of Scapula in
the fortress of the XXth legion and his departure,
several days later, with one and a half legions and
two wings of cavalry. Their progress north was
monitored and harried lightly from the sides and
rear. No-one of significance was slain on either
side. It was not expected that they would be, yet.

On the fourth night of the new moon, under a
black, frosted sky, the healed and rested warriors
of Mona joined with the massed spears of the
Ordovices, Silures, Cornovii and Durotriges.
Those who had fought for freedom these last eight
years were joined in their thousands by the young
men and women newly come to adulthood who
chose war above servitude. In all, they were nearly
ten thousand, a number to match two legions.

Against the tribes marched the men most
responsible, in the eyes of the gods and of the
dreamers, for the death by hanging of two entire
Eceni villages, down to and including a threeyearold
girl, plus the appalling repression of the
Trinovantes that still continued. The forthcoming
battle was for retribution as much as it was for
freedom.

Following Caradoc's prediction, the river of the
Lame Hind formed a boundary between the two
armies. Fires burned through the night on the
slopes on either side of its widest point. This once,
there was no need for the tribes to hide their
presence or position. As he had done once before,
Caradoc had ordered more fires lit than there were
warriors, so that the legions, seeing them, might
believe they faced overwhelming numbers and lose
heart. In the river valley, white water reflected star
points of light and the greater orange bloom of
flame. A long, narrow defile ran north-west away
from the two encampments, the only route out
of the valley. Passage through it was blocked by a
solid rampart of oak logs and boulders the height
of a man and half as much again; the barricade of
the salmon-trap, reproduced in larger scale from
Dubornos' original. Caradoc had learned a lesson
from the reports of the earlier battle; no horses
would jump the rampart this time to wreak havoc 
among the tribes caught behind it.

Both sides settled for the night. The dreamers 
built their own fire apart on a rocky outcrop just
below the mountain's peak. A stunted rowan drooped berries by the handful over the vertiginous
fall of the slope beneath. On the flat stone at
the lip of the outcrop, a vast blaze of beech wood,
apple and hawthorn cracked sparks high into the
night.

Two hundred singers and dreamers gathered
round it. Never since the invasion had so many of
those trained by Mona come together, nor with
such focused intent. If it were given them, they
would see the death of Scapula before the fire was
lit again. Of those with greatest power, whose 
dialogue with the gods was most direct, only Airmid was missing. Her place was on Mona with
the Boudica and the new child. Breaca had not
been alone in dreaming Graine as key to the future
of the tribes and the infant's early days were
guarded by all the known means. Thus Airmid's
absence was accepted, even while she was missed

Dubornos felt her lack as he would the loss of
his shield in battle. He did not work closely with
her; months could go by without their exchanging
a word, but he knew her presence and absence as surely as he knew light and dark, heat and cold,
love and loss. It did not make his part impossible
to play, but it made it immeasurably harder.

On the night before a battle that was bigger
than any he had seen since the invasion, he stood
before the fire with the others with whom he
shared the great-house on Mona; with Maroc the
Elder and Luain mac Calma, once of Hibernia,
and Efnis who had been foremost amongst the
dreamers of the northern Eceni until the hangings
began and it was no longer safe for him to remain
there. These three were the greatest: the bear, the
heron, the falcon - hunters all, with the insight
that gave to their dreaming. At their sides were a
hundred others who had lived and trained with
them for ten years or more and were accustomed
to working together. Joining them for the first time
in battle were the dreamers of the western tribes,
those men and women who had remained to hold
safe the heart of their people in a time of ceaseless
war. They came together in groups of like kind
and alliances were formed or re-formed that gave
strength to each that was greater than they could
dream of when working in the relative isolation of
the tribes.

Efnis, dreamer of the Eceni, led the gathering.
Alone of them all, he had seen the faces of the
three among the enemy whose deaths mattered
most to the tribes: Governor Scapula, the legate of
the XXth legion and the decurion of the Thracian
auxiliary who rode the pied horse. So that the
others might know them as well as he, he offered
his memories to the fire, each bound with the hair
of a red mare to sticks of green hawthorn. In
the smoke of their burning, others inhaled the
essences of the men they hunted, letting them
settle in their minds: a flash of a face seen in profile, the particular scent of one man in battle that
sets him apart from the rest, the sound of a voice
raised in command, or lowered in repose, the love
of a father for his son and of a man for his shield
mates, the complex loathing of one who kills to
cover his own self-hate.

Nothing was clear, but there was enough of
each man that, in the chaos of battle, the dreamers
might find the loosened souls of those they sought
and bring them fear or despair or a slowness of
reflex that would give the warriors a chance to
land a killing blow. It was the best they could do
and it was not perfect, but it had worked
in the past and, with the gods' help, it could be
made to work again.

When it came to the last of the three, the
decurion who rode the pied horse, Dubornos
added his own sticks to the fire, similarly bound.
He had taken four days to make them, sleeping
alone with his memories of a time he would have
preferred to forget, sharpening to a focused clarity
patterns previously hidden in a fog of grief and
anger, and then binding them with his own blood
and tears to the green-cut branches of a berried
hawthorn.

If there had been a way to do it without remembering,
Dubornos would have taken it, whatever
the cost. After the burning of the fort, when it had
been clear that Scapula was going to send his
forces against the Eceni, Dubornos had organized
the first salmon-trap and had believed it a success.
Men and women of the Eceni and the Coritani had
died in their hundreds, but they had sold their lives
at an overwhelming price, fighting with a savagery
unknown in the history of the tribes to destroy the
auxiliaries sent against them. Dubornos had wept
at those losses even while his soul exulted at the
victory that had sent the handful of remaining
enemy back to the fortress bearing the bodies of
their fallen officers across their saddles. In the
days immediately afterwards, before they had
understood the nature and unthinkable extent of
Scapula's reprisals, his only disquiet, his single
gnawing doubt, had been the frisson-of raw hatred
he had felt from the junior officer who had seen
the danger of the salmon-trap and had later led the
horses in over the barricade to save his surviving
comrades, riding at the front on a pied horse that
killed as savagely as any warrior.

Dubornos had seen the horse long before he
took notice of the man. When the auxiliaries had
abandoned their mounts and fought on foot, there
had seemed a good chance that the beast might be
captured and brought into the breeding herds.
Later, seeing it ridden, the regret at its loss had
been greater. Only afterwards, when the hangings
of the villagers began, had the temperaments of
both beast and rider become clear. Dubornos' one
source of solace in the time of desolation and
despair after the atrocities was that he had not
instilled such unremitting hatred into Mona's
horse herds. In the making of his memory-sticks,
he had bound the horse as closely as the rider,
merging both into a single entity and marking it as
evil.

He leaned forward and placed the last branch in
the heart of the blaze. Wizened berries shrivelled
and burst. Flames wrapped the skin of his forearm
and he felt no heat. The fire consumed the
wood and hair, sending his memories to the gods
and the waiting dreamers. There were few words
that could do justice to the evil he felt from this
man but he gave them as well, to flesh out the
picture. He is tall and lean and his hair is black.
He rides a pied horse that kills as he kills. With his
own hands, he killed the children.

Sighing, two hundred dreamers took in his
words and gave them life. The air around the outcrop shivered in the heat. With smoke in their
hearts and flame scalding their skins, the dreamers
of Mona and the west drew a collective breath
and, with it, began to bend their minds to
vengeance.

Dawn broke behind them, cold and clear. The
dreamers' fire died to glowing ash and the two
hundred dispersed, scrambling down the
mountainside to find and wake their warriors,and
give them the gods' good will before battle.
Dubornos sought the largest of the warriors' fires
and found it at the northerly end of the ridge
above the waterfall that marked the broadest
point of the river. Here, the honour guard of
Mona had slept, sharing the fire with Caradoc and
his Ordovices.

Men and women were waking, stretching sleep
from cramped muscles, rubbing heather dew on
their faces or seeking out the small streams that
tumbled over the rock-strewn slope. A few slid
down through the scrub towards the midden
trenches. Others had clearly been awake longer.
Ardacos, who led the warriors of the she-bear and
was the left arm of the Boudica's honour guard,
crouched to one side near a blackthorn thicket
with a dozen of his band. They smelled strongly of
woad and bear grease and grey symbols swirled on
their naked bodies, the result of half a night's
painting. The hafts of their spears were made of
white ash, dulled almost to black by the blood
of a bear, the blades were leaf-shaped and longer
than any others on the field,'and undyed heron
feathers dangled from the necks. They pressed
handprints in white clay on their shoulders and
reaffirmed battle oaths to each other in a language
that Dubornos, master of eight separate tongues
and a dozen dialects in each, had never heard.

Beyond the she-bears, Braint, the young woman
of the Brigantes who led the centre of the honour
guard in Breaca's absence, bound the skull of a
wild cat into the mane of her horse. Closer to the
fire, Gwyddhien, who led the right flank, painted
the mark of the grey falcon on the left shoulder of
her battle mare above the serpent-spear of the
Boudica. It was she whom Dubornos sought. He
scuffed down through the tangling heather and
stood nearby, waiting.

Of all her people, Gwyddhien was the most
striking. Always tall, the war-knot of the Silures
tied in her black hair made her taller. Her skin was
smoothly brown with few scars and none of them
about the face. Her cheekbones were high and set
wide, as was the way with some of the western
tribes in whom the blood of the ancestors ran
clear. One could easily see why another might find
her attractive.

The woman finished and looked up; she had
known he was there. Dubornos gave the warrior's
salute and said, 'Airmid sends you her heart and
soul for the duration of battle. She walks where
you walk and dreams as you dream.'

It was the formal greeting between lovers when
circumstances forced them apart in times of wir.
For a moment, Gwyddhien became less the
warrior and more the woman. Her eyes were
the greyed green of old hazel leaves made brighter
by the frost of the dawn. When she smiled, they
sparked as if struck by flint and iron.

'Thank you.' Her salute was that of a warriorto
her dreamer when the latter is of highest rank. It
honoured Dubornos, intentionally. 'Is Breaca
well?' she asked.

He would have left but could not; custom
demanded that he answer. 'She thrives, and the
child with her. Her greatest regret is that she
cannot join the battle.'

'But she sends her other child to take her place
and thus deprives you of the chance to fight.'
Gwyddhien's brows arched enough to make the
statement a question without impugning its
wisdom.

'Cunomar?' Dubornos grimaced. 'No. Breaca
would have stopped him from coming but
Caradoc had already said he could accompany us.
He felt guilt, I think, at the amount of time he had
spent with Breaca and the new babe and then that
he had given his mother's swan-hilted blade to
Cygfa for the battle. He had to give something to
Cunomar of equal worth, and permission to join
him today was the only thing that would serve.
The boy chafes at the bridle like a yearling that
wants to race before its bones are set.'

'He thinks the war will be over and he will have
won no honour to match his parents'. In his place, I would feel the same.'

'Maybe. But I think in his place you would have
listened to your elders.'

She stared at him, nodding. 'As you did at his
age. Or older?'

On the eve of battle, the past took root in the
present. The breath soured in Dubornos' throat.
He would have turned away but Gwyddhien
took hold of his shoulder and held him still, facing
her. If he chose, he could read compassion in
her gaze, or pity. Very badly, he wanted neither.

Gwyddhien said, 'Airmid sent you with the
message for me. That should be proof enough that
she holds none of your past against you.' And
then, when he made no reply, 'You should talk to
her about it sometime.'

'As she has talked to you.'

Gwyddhien shrugged. 'Of course. Did you think
she would not? You are the foremost singer of
Mona, she one of the strongest dreamers, and yet
you speak only when the need is overwhelming.
The distance between you has been clear from the
day you first came to the island. I asked about it only before the invasion, when it was necessary to
know on whom we could truly rely. She named
you as one of those whom she trusted most closely
and, having seen you in her company, I questioned
it. Even knowing the whole story - particularly
knowing the whole story - there was no possibility
I would think less of you for it.'

'Why not? I do.'

'I know. That's why we're speaking of it now.
We all make mistakes in our youth of which we
are ashamed. The difference is that the rest of us
can forgive the ignorance of the child we were and
believe in the honour of the adult we have become.
You were fifteen years old when Amminios' eagles
ambushed Breaca and your people in the valley of
the Heron River, you had barely passed your long-nights and had never seen battle. Warriors with
more kill-feathers than any died that day. Breca's
father was one of the Eceni's' foremost warriors 
and they cut him down like a hunted deer. Your
father was injured, 'Tagos lost an arm and
Ban was killed and his body taken; Breaca herself
was lucky to come out alive. The gods guided you
then as they guide all of us, always. If you had not
feigned death, you might well have died with the
others.' 

'But at least I would have died with honour.'

Gwyddhien looked beyond him down into the
valley to where the river ran cold and white. She
chewed on her lower lip in the way Airmid did
when she was thinking.

Presently, she said, 'It might do you some good
to think how many battles you have fought since
that day with exceptional honour, how many lives
you have saved, how many others have relied on
your strength and your presence in the worst of
times. You have been central to so much. If the
gods had wanted you dead, you would be dead.
They do not and you should care about that if you
don't care about yourself. You carry your shame
into battle and it changes who you are. One day,
it will slow you when the enemy is fast. I would
prefer that not to happen. As would Airmid.'

Of all she said, the last words burned deepest.
Before the singer could reply, a horn sounded
nearby. Bear claws rattled in rhythm against the
hollowness of a skull. A falcon screamed from
another fire, a sound to chill the hearts of the
enemy. The morning came alive with moving
warriors, riding and running in waves down the
mountainside. Dubornos felt himself pushed apart
from his fellows, a husk with his tongue glued stiff
with the shame of the past.

Gwyddhien lifted her sheathed sword from a
rock and looped the carry-thong over her head. A
spear and shield hung together from her saddle
bow. Each bore a frog, painted green, the mark of
Airmid's dream. Her hand once again gripped
Dubornos' shoulder. He felt the prints for half a
day.

'You have chosen the path of greatest courage,'
she said. 'We all honour you for it.'

'I do what I must.'

'I know. That doesn't make it easy.' In her mind,

the warrior was already riding the slope down
to the river, rehearsing the many varying plans of
battle. With a clear effort, she brought herself
back, turning to face him. 'We will be on the right
flank. If you need help to guard the child, get
word to me. I will send whoever I can spare.
Remember that.'

'Thank you. I will.'

Cunomar was the only one below fighting age on
the mountain. His peers, without exception, had
accepted the need to stay at home; in this battle,
there were no children carrying water or tending
to the horses, no hostages to Rome who might
need protection, except this one. He crouched
alone on the far side of his father's fire. Hail lay
beside him, an unwilling guardian.  The great
hound's soul remained on Mona with Breaca and
the newborn infant. As it had not been with
Cunomar, the bonding at Graine's birth had been
immediate and complete. The hound mourned her
absence, visibly, as did the boy, if for different
reasons.

Around the pair, warriors finished their last
preparations for war, and Cunomar looked on stonily. It was Cygfa whose presence upset him
most. His half-sister was nearing her long-nights'.
For months now her first bleeding had been
expected and it was widely agreed that, once
adult, she would be a warrior of a calibre to match
their father. She had trained since infancy amongst
her mother's people, the Ordovices, and the
warriors of the war hammer were known across
the land as the most ferocious of the west. Later,
Cygfa had joined her father on Mona and trained
in the warriors' school, learning sword and spear
moves from men and women considered the best
of any tribe. When the time of the battle had come
and she had not yet gained her spear, the elders
had agreed that she could attempt to win it in fair
combat, as Breaca had done. Her mother,
Cwmfen, fought in Caradoc's honour guard and
Cygfa had been granted permission to ride at her
side.

For Cunomar, that alone would have been
unbearable, but then Breaca had made a gift to the
girl of the shaggy, wide-hoofed war horse that had
carried her as the Boudica through the invasion
battle. The beast, known as the bear-horse for the
length of his pelt and the shape of his nose, was
sire to half of the best youngstock on Mona but
his passion was war and he had not seen enough
of it. Breaca rode the grey mare for preference,
even when the animal was old enough to be turned
away to pasture. Granted now to Cygfa, the
bear-horse revelled in the smells and portents of war.
He stood with his head high and his ears up and
only years of training in the need for silence before
battle kept him from screaming his challenge to 
the morning. His presence, together with the
swan-hilted blade that had been Caradoc's gift to 
her, made Cygfa one of the best mounted, best
armed warriors on the field. Cunomar hated her
and let it show.

Dubornos skirted the fire towards him. 'Good
morning.'

The child nodded but did not answer. His gaze
was fixed on the two warriors on the far side of
the fire. Cygfa stood with Braint of the Brigantes,
braiding her hair at the sides. In the splendour of
the dawn, the pair could have been sisters, or two
of the three parts of Briga: the one darkhaired,
dark-skinned and scarred from battle, the other
fair of hair and skin and unblemished. All they
lacked was the grandmother, grey-haired and
lame. Cygfa had not yet killed and had no right to
wear the black crow feather at her temple but
Gwyddhien had given her a falcon's grey-barred
tail feather with the quill stained black and red to
bring on Briga's luck and Braint was showing her
the proper way to fix it. They laughed together
and the noise rolled down the mountain like
the ring of iron on stone. Cunomar scowled
and his mouth moved in a clear, if silent, curse.

Dubornos perched on a rock at his side.
Childless, he had never learned the ways of reaching
children and searching his own past for aid
had proved little help. He chose, therefore, to
address the young as if they were already adult.
Often, he was successful. With Cunomar, he could
never tell how it would be.

'Your sister rides for the first time into battle,'
he said. 'It won't help her if you wish her ill. Nor
you if she dies and you have no chance to call back
your curse.'

Amber eyes flicked sideways and away. 'She
won't die. She's as good as father, everyone says
so. She'll carve the Romans into meat for the
hounds.'

It was a subtle insult, carefully honed. The
legions were rumoured to feed the dead of their
enemies to their hounds, one more atrocity in their
manifold tally. No warrior of the tribes would ever
countenance such a thing.

Dubornos said, 'That does not become you. If
you dishonour Cygfa, the slur extends also to your
father and her mother. Would you wish that
on them when they go to fight Scapula and
the decurion of the Thracian cavalry who rides the
pied horse?'

The mention of the two greatest enemies in one
breath had the effect he desired. With his shield
hand, Cunomar made the complex gesture that
unmade all curses. 'They will win,' said the child
sullenly. 'And you and I will have sat here through
the day, watching, while others earn their kill-feathers
and make the tales that will be told at the
fire.'

If it was hard for a grown man who was oathsworn
of his own free will to keep back from the
front line, how much harder for a child who did so
only because he was ordered by his father?
Dubornos reached in his pouch for the knuckle
bones he carried as perpetual distraction. He cast
them on the scorched turf by the fire and studied
the way they lay. 'We can only pray so,' he said,
drily. 'Meanwhile, it will be some time before
battle is joined. Would you care to play?'

xv.

'Did you know there would be so many of them?'

Longinus Sdapeze sat his chestnut mare, resting
his forearms on the front of the saddle. The entire
wing of the First Thracian Cavalry stretched out
behind him in rows of eight. Julius Valerius, outwardly
recovered from his encounter with his god,
sat at his side, studying the enemy and the
geography of a battle site that was not of his
choosing, nor would ever have been. It was the
salmon-trap of the Eceni all over again, but then
they had known from the start that it would be;
the inquisitors had found that out for them. Their
advantage, such as it was, lay in this forewarning
and the other news gathered from spies and fallen
warriors. Valerius could only wait and judge its
accuracy as the battle progressed.

Meanwhile, they had the river to cross. It ran in
front of them, in full autumn spate so that the
force of the water ate away at the banks, and
pools at which in earlier months the deer had
drunk were sluicing wells of strong currents.
Storm-split branches and other debris from the
high mountains spun down heavily enough to
sweep horse and rider from their feet and drag
them under. At the only sane fording point, the
water foamed and spun and crashed through piles
of smoothed boulders and jagged rocks, placed
days ahead by Caradoc's warriors to make the
crossing more treacherous.

On the far bank, warriors in their thousands
stood in clusters, or sat their painted horses, waiting.
A man who knew what to look for could pick
out the bands and sub-bands of the tribes by style
of hair and cloak colour and the dyed flanks of the
horses. A man searching for one specific enemy
could find with ease the yellow hair and multicoloured
cloak of Caradoc and the knot of
white-cloaked Ordovices about him. That same
man could note that the rumours were true and
that a second Caradoc rode at his side, whitecloaked
and bare-headed and mounted on a horse,
that had been in every major battle since the
invasion, but now bore a new rider whose hair
was not the red of a fox in autumn.

Caradoc and his daughter did not take part in
the posturing that was the usual prelude to battle,
From among the rest of their ranks, a warrior
would periodically accept a challenge and step forward
to hurl insults and spears at the enemy. The
tribes had learned since the invasion; the spears
they threw were stolen legionary javelins, tipped with soft iron that bent on impact so that they
could not be picked up and thrown back at their
original senders. On a day like today, with the
river so broad, it made little difference; very few
had the power to send a spear clean across to the
far bank. Their impact was more on the minds and hearts of the waiting legions who must stand
and watch what faced them. Twice already, sorely
provoked, a century of legionaries had stepped to
the river's edge and hurled their own javelins,
wasting them likewise in the water.

The morning passed too slowly, with nothing to
show for it. Somewhere out of sight, a war band
started up a high-pitched, ululating chant that
wove through the thunder of the river and soared
over it, stretching further the overstretched nerves
of the new recruits. In the foremost lines of the
legions, men new to battle gripped their short
swords and refixed their shields, wasting energy
and condensing their fear. On the far right, set
back from the river, Scapula's standard cracked in
the wind. Twice so far the governor had ridden
down to the water and twice backed away again.
Valerius watched him and felt the indecision
spread south down the line. He felt, also,
Longinus waiting for an answer to his question
and realized he had answered it only in his mind.

'There are fewer of them than were at the
Thames on the first day of the battle,' he said. 'We
should be glad he has gathered only the western
tribes. If Cartimandua's Brigantes were not sworn
to us, we would be facing twice or three times this
number.'

He raised himself high in the saddle and looked
north. The governor's ewe-necked gelding was still
balking at the water. Valerius cleared his throat
and spat, a uniquely Thracian habit with uniquely
Thracian implications. 'We could sit here all day if
we're waiting for Scapula to get his bloody horse
into the river.'

Longinus said, 'We may as well. He's only going
to make us dismount on the other side. Myself, I'd
rather stay on my horse.'

'We can if we hold the ford.'

'We'd have to take it first.'

'I know.'

A rider bearing a white armband on his mail
waited to one side, designated for the day as a
runner, to fight only in extreme need. To him,
Valerius said, 'Take word to Governor Scapula
that the acting prefect of the Ala Prima Thracum
believes that his men can make a crossing of the
river and hold it so that the legionaries will be able
to cross downstream of our horses. If he gives the
word, we will attempt it. If he can spare men with
javelins to give us cover, that would make the
attempt more likely to succeed.'

The command was too long in coming. The
enemy dreamers had long since marked the men
they knew. Valerius had felt them at the beginning,
that tickle of meeting minds, of mutual loathing,
and the challenge that was of the spirit and the
gods and not of battle. Still, it was in battle that
the wills of the gods were made manifest and the
delay in Scapula's order gave the dreamers and
singers of Mona time to gather on a heathered
slope directly opposite the Thracian cavalry and to
direct their ire and that of their slingers at one man
and the horse he rode. Valerius felt them long
before the first sling-stones began to puncture the
river in rippling lines ahead of him.

Longinus said, 'If you ride in there, you're
dead.'

'Is that your ill-feeling again?'

'No, it's common sense. You should stay on the
bank and give them a target and let the rest of us
make the crossing.'

'Maybe, but if the god wants me dead, I'll be
dead wherever I go. If you think I'm bad luck, I'll
stay apart. Otherwise, I'll lead and draw their
attention, and the rest of you who follow will be
safer.'

'Is that meant to be encouraging?'

'No, it's common sense.'

'Good. Then have the sense also to remember
what Corvus said. The governor wants Caradoc
and his family alive to parade before the emperor
in Rome. If you're seen to kill him, they'll nail you
to a plank and leave you. Others apart from me
would think that an awful waste of a life.'

'I won't forget.'

He had not forgotten, could not forget. Corvus
had addressed the officers in a group but his eyes
and his words, and the threat they carried, had
been for Valerius. Valerius had smiled at no-one in
particular and gone away to design his own
pennant for the battle. Since the cave, he had
begun to understand more deeply the words of his
god; there are many more ways to destroy a man
than to kill him in battle. He considered those
ways and savoured them and prayed that he might
bring at least one of them about.

He believed absolutely that the god heard and
was with him. All through the morning, the words
of the deity whispered in his head. His death is
matched by your death, or the death of one you
love. Caradoc was still very clearly alive. While
the corn-gold head remained a beacon amidst the
enemy, Valerius believed himself safe. When,
belatedly, the order came from the governor to
attempt the crossing, he pushed the Crow-horse a
pace at a time into the murderous torrent. Thirty-two
men of the first troop, First Thracian Cavalry,
followed in a line behind.

As they entered the water, Valerius said,
'They've seen the red bull pennant. If you were
ever planning to pray to Mithras, now would be a
good time.'

Longinus Sdapeze, who had no intention whatever
of praying to the bull-slayer, but had been
praying all day to his own gods, could have sworn
he heard his decurion laugh.

A handful of knuckle bones lay forgotten on the
ash-strewn turf. A man, a boy and a grizzled,
three-legged war hound lay on their bellies on the
dreamers' outcrop and looked down on the backs
of circling crows. Beneath the birds, a river
thundered blackly; on its northern bank, small as
field mice, men and women scurried back and
forth, fighting for land and life, for honour
and fame, for the futures of their born and unborn
children. Against them, like so many beetles,
fought the legions.

Battle had been a long time coming. For a while,
it had seemed to both sides as if the volume of
water alone would defeat them and Caradoc's
salmon-trap would never be put into effect.
Dubornos, watching, feared that Venutios might
come too early and his warriors, particularly the
small, undisciplined war bands of the Selgovae,
being unable to contain themselves, might hurtle
down the mountain at the enemy and betray the
plan.

It was only when the Thracian auxiliaries rode
in at the rear of the enemy column that he had the
first sense of how it might go. From the safety of
his god-sworn heights, Dubornos saw first the
pied horse, then the rider, and then, impossibly,
stunningly, he saw the personal standard fluttering
high over his head.

'Briga take him, he's stolen the sign of the bull.'

Others around the field had seen it. A string of
oaths ran north to south and back again amongst
dreamers, singers and warriors. If Briga listened
that day, she was called on more in the first few
moments than at any other time throughout the
battle. If she looked, she would have seen a man
sworn to another god who had taken as his
personal emblem the mark of the bull as it was
first carved by the ancestors of the tribes at the
time when the gods were young.

The gods alone know what the symbol meant
for them, but for the tribes the marks of the
ancestors were sacred to all, so that no one tribe
took them for itself but kept them as a sign of
honour for all the gods. The bull particularly was
beautiful in its simplicity, bulky and bold, full of
pride and unyielding vigour. For the enemy
blatantly to take it was ultimate sacrilege. For him
to mount it in stolen colours made it more so, and
this he had done; the background to the pennant
was the iron-grey of Mona, and onto it the
rounded, flowing shape of the ancestors' bullform
had been etched in a deep, rich red as if
painted directly onto the cloth in newly shed
blood. Breaca's serpent-spear was painted in
exactly that ever-living blood and had been since
long before Claudius first sent his legions. The two
things together, colour and sign, were an unmistakable
message from a man who had taken
part in the invasion battles and had used the time
since to learn his enemy's strengths, enough to
subvert them for his own use. In language anyone
could read they said, What was sacred of yours
has become mine. I can turn it to my own will.
Stand against me if you dare.

'We dare. Oh, gods, we dare.' Barred from
battle and close to weeping with frustration,
Dubornos smashed the edge of his balled fist
against the rock by his head. 'Efnis, wherever you
are, come to the water's edge and direct the
slingers against that one. If we get none of
the others, his death alone would make this battle
worth the while.'

'I'm sorry.'

'What?' 

The singer's mind and heart were in the battle:
He had forgotten the child. Cunomar sat crosslegged
beside him, Hail's head on his knee. He was weeping silently but copiously. 'I'm sorry,' he said
again. 'It's my fault you're here. If it weren't for
me, you would be there in the fight. You could kill the pied decurion yourself.'

Dubornos had not meant to speak aloud. It was
not part of his oath that others should feel in his
debt. He turned on one elbow, dragging his eyes
from the gathered armies. 'That's not your
concern. I am here because I choose to be. There
is no fault, no blame.'

'But there is, isn't there?' At times Breaca's son
displayed a wilful selfishness that bespoke neither
of his parents. At others - now - he was entirely
his mother. He pursed his lips and the straight line
carved between his brows, as hers did. His voice
was no longer a child's, but that of an adult,
talking reason.

'Ardacos told me,' he said. 'You were cowardly
in your first battle and afterwards, out of shame,
you forswore the ways of the warrior and became
a hunter and maker of harness. Later, when the
gods marked you as singer and warrior both, you
made an oath to Briga and Nemain to protect my
mother's children, your life for theirs, wherever
they went. But I would have been safe on Mona
and you could have come here and fought against
the decurion on the pied horse, so it's my fault that
you can't.'

The sun burned from the south-east. In the
valley, warriors waded into the water the better to
throw their spears. On both sides, the souls of the
battle-slain began their journey to the world of
the dead. Here, too, they faced a river, wider and
faster flowing than any they had ever met in life.
With Briga's aid, they forded it, some more easily
than others, leaving only memories in the land of
life. On the heights of the mountain, Dubornos
mac Sinochos, singer of Mona, once of the Eceni,
remembered his father and another day of
fighting. It was not a scene he readily forgot; his
mornings woke to it and his days ended with the
bitterness of its truth. The child who was the voice
of his conscience met his gaze evenly, trading new
guilt for old.

The gods demand and it is given to men to offer
their souls. Dubornos searched the depths of his
and answered with honesty.

'You may be right,' he said. 'If you had stayed
behind, I might have come here to fight. But I
might just as well have stayed on Mona with you,
your mother and the new child, in which case it is
because of you that I am here at all to witness
what is taking place, and gather deeds to fire the
songs of later. My oath was freely given, and
the gods know best how to use it. I am here
because they willed it as much as you. Would you
hold the gods at fault?'

Unexpectedly, the child considered this, frowning.
'I might, if they destroyed the things I cared
for. Or if they kept from me my heart's wish. Is it
true you have loved Airmid since childhood and
will take no other lover while she lives?'

The words fell into quiet, as if the howling
chants of the warriors giving and taking life in the
valley were less than the sigh of a spring breeze. A
thrush sang from the rowan and the high notes
pierced Dubornos' head. He stared at the boy,
who stared back. Very carefully, because, for the
first time in as long as he chose to remember, his
hold on his temper was not certain, Dubornos
said, 'Who told you that? Was it Ardacos?'

'No. I heard Braint tell' Cygfa. It was while you
were talking to Gwyddhien. Anyone could see
you were uncomfortable in her company. Cygfa
thought you craved Gwyddhien and were sore
because she was Airmid's. Braint said it was the
other way round. Efnis told her what happened.
He knew you all as children in the Eceni home
lands before the invasion, she said. It's true, isn't
it?'

Dubornos had sworn never again to lie. He had
not sworn to expose all of his soul to a child. He
said, 'If it is, does it matter?'

'It matters to Cygfa. She thinks you don't notice
her and grieves for it.'

A child may see what a man does not, particularly
if the latter's attention is elsewhere.

Nevertheless, it was not a conversation Dubornos
wished to pursue. 'Does she so? That's strange when she is your father come to life in female form
and every other warrior, man and woman, sees it.
I think that when your sister is past her longnights,
she will not worry that one man among
thousands may not see her in the way that she -- What
is it?'

Cunomar's eyes were widely black. The whites
flared like those of a startled horse. He pointed
down into the cauldron of conflict. 'The
decurion,' he said. 'The one on the pied horse with
the red bull banner. He is swimming his mount
across the river. His troop are following
him across.'

He was right. Some things require a man's undivided attention and the means by which
Scapula's legions forded the river of the Lame
Hind in pursuit of Caratacus was one of them.
Dubornos lay on his high ledge and watched as a
troop of Thracian auxiliaries, led by a man he
loathed but whose courage he could not question,
swam their horses into the torrent and stood
broadside to the flow, stringing a rope between
them so that the infantry might wade across and
not drown as they did so.

The officer on the pied horse stood midstream,
presenting a ready target to the warriors on the far
side. Efnis was there, directing spears and slingers alike. He was joined by over half the dreamers of
Mona and the decurion became the target of many
warriors. At no time was he hit. Sling-stones and
spears carved the white water, legionaries and
cavalrymen of other troops died on either side, but
the pennant of the red bull remained upright,
and the pied horse and his rider beneath it.

Dubornos cursed viciously and knew he was not
alone. It was widely believed that, from time to
time, Briga sent her emissaries in the shape of
enemy warriors to claim the lives of those she had
already marked for herself. In those cases, the
chosen one could not be killed by normal means
but only by a dreamer who was prepared to face
Briga's wrath. It was also possible that Mithras,
the bull-slayer, was pleased with this man and
had the power to protect him on the field of battle
in a land that was not his own. Or he may simply
have been lucky; it was best to think so because a
man's luck may be made 'to change by other men
who do not require the intervention of the gods.
The efforts to kill him were redoubled without
effect.

With the rope in place, the legionaries swarmed
across the water. One could not fault their
discipline, or the order with which they fought.
Their clashes with the warriors were fiercest on
the north bank of the river. The principle of the
salmon-trap depended on the legions' swarming,
uncaring, over the rampart into the defile when in
all probability the decurion of the Thracians had
warned them of the trap. The defending warriors,
therefore, must fight as if their lives depended on
it, as if the barrier at their backs were a retreat of
last resort, as if the war would be won or lost in
the rock-cluttered, blood-slick slopes of the
mountain. Knowing this, claiming honour and
fame with every kill, they fought as savagely as
they had ever done.

In the chaos, Caradoc was readily visible, his
hair bright beneath the ever-rising sun. Cygfa
stayed close to him, both of them blazing beacons
in the thickest point of battle. Ardacos' she-bears
could be heard, howling their war songs, and once
in a while a circle of them became visible,
surrounding a huddle of doomed legionaries.
Gwyddhien's horse-warriors circled the margins,
attacking cavalry and infantry alike. Braint held a
solid line in the centre, her warriors carving space
in the air around them with swords that rose and
fell like threshing flails.

On the enemy side, Scapula was surrounded by
a century of legionaries and could not be
approached. The rest of his men kept to their lines
and fought with their shields locked as they had
been trained to, stepping forward over the bodies
of the slain. The officer on the pied horse was
visible only because his men held the ground
around the water's edge. His standard fell once as
the bearer's horse was killed beneath him, but the
rider rolled free and it could be seen that the
decurion brought him up on the pied horse and
called another man forward to hold the standard
until the bearer found another mount. Thereafter,
fouled and bloody, the red bull could only rarely
be picked out from the others. Dubornos held to
his memory of a single moment of hatred and
prayed to Briga that the man would die before he
could warn his governor of the trap, or simply that
he would die.

Horns wailed along the river bank. Slowly,
slowly, the legions advanced. The cavalry took
the sides, blocking the routes of escape so that the
warriors must go backwards or die where they
stood. Many died but more of the legionaries died
with them. Amidst the clustering souls of the dead,
the majority, by two to one, were foreigners lost in
a land not their own, seeking absent gods they had
not thought would abandon them.

The rearmost warriors had reached the barrier.
More were already waiting behind it, providing
shelter and thrown spears to keep the legions at
bay while their shield-mates scaled the outer
surface. Ladders on the inside made an easy
descent. In the crowded valley, for a moment, the
killing stopped. Both sides paused, taking breath
and water and eating handfuls of malted grain or
strips of dried meat. On the Roman side, raised
and tilted standards sent complex messages along the short, dense ranks. The freshest legionaries came to the fore. At the wings, the auxiliaries dismounted.
Everything was as it had been in the
lands of the Eceni, but on a larger scale. If the
governor recognized the trap, he believed himself its
equal. On a rocky outcrop, high above the battle, a
warrior and a child looked north, seeking sign of
three thousand warriors. In the far distance, on the
ridge of a mountain, Dubornos saw a single, bareheaded
man walking on foot leading a horse. A
forewarning of disaster fluttered lightly in his chest, 

Go!

The command came in Latin, or Eceni, or
simply in thought. The echo of it rattled the
heights, sprinted the length of the defile. In
the pause was an intaken breath and in its exhalation,
in the roar of the legions, was a single
message: We are the might of Rome, come alive
and victorious. None can withstand us!

In the forest, bears paused in their meanderings,
stags halted the battles of the rut. Over the highest
peaks, eagles wheeled in flight, facing into a wind
not sent by the gods. In the rock-littered valley,
legionaries in their thousands beat their blades in
thundering cacophony against their shields and,
assailed by rocks and spears and sling-stones, the
charge to the rampart began.

They made roofs of their shields and huddled
beneath them. They clawed at rocks with their bare
hands, hacking at oak beams with their blades.
Many died but as many replaced them; in Scapula's
army, one man was another, each of equal worth
and weight. With apparent reluctance, the
defenders drew back as the sea of infantry began to
spill into their valley, first a trickle, then a flood as
the dam cracked and opened. The trap was sprung.
All it needed now was a hammer to close it. On the
far mountainside, a rider mounted, checked the air
for the sounds of dying and set off at a canter down
the track.

Boulders were tilted from their seats into the
thickest knots of the enemy. Warriors hurled rocks
and spears from the heights, then scrambled down
to fight. The legions surged into the valley and
made it their own. Their back remained exposed
and unchallenged but no hammer came. No three
thousand spears of the Brigantes and the Selgovae.
Venutios did not close the back door to the
salmon-trap. Even the scout was lost beyond a
mountain's ridge.

If Venutios fails, we will kill as many as we may
and then leave them.

Caradoc had said it privately to Breaca and
again, frequently, to those who led each of the
sections of his force. Every fighting man and woman
knew the threefold blast that signalled true retreat,
quite different from the wailing horns of the false
withdrawals. Dubomos heard it and cursed, his
words flapping out over the clashing weapons and
the lazy downward spiral of the ravens.

Cunomar said, 'They mustn't stop now! The
messenger is still coming. I can see the horse. It
might not be too late.'

'No. A single rider is not a war host and it's
already too late. Look, the legions are all within
the valley. They hold the flat ground and their
engineers are already dismantling the rampart,
giving them a clear retreat. They are at their
strongest when they hold solid ranks as they do
here. We can kill them in handfuls, but we are not
enough to overwhelm them. Your father is right. It
is time for those who remain to retreat. The forests
are safe. Better a thousand living warriors to fight
another day than so many dead heroes.'

The singer pushed himself to his feet. Despair
weighted his chest, adding to old grief. For the
first time in three decades' living, he felt stiffness
in his shoulders and knees. He clicked his fingers
for Hail and felt a damp nose touch his wrist.

'We should leave,' he said. 'It's not beyond
Scapula to try to claim the heights, or one of his
officers. We should meet your father where we
agreed in the woods at the river's head.'

Ancient heather knotted the track, slowing their
passing. Blueberries stained the ground underfoot,
marking the trail of two horses and a hound.
Dubornos rode ahead with Cunomar a step or two
behind. Hail wove between, as quick on three legs
as four. Descending from the dreamers' outcrop,
they met a line of dense, hock-deep bracken and
turned across it rather than wade through. Shortly
after, they met Cygfa and her mother Cwmfen,
riding up at an angle from the valley. The girl was
stained and filthy, blood oozing from a shallow
spear cut on one thigh. Her own spear and shield
were gone, and she bore instead a wide, heavy
man's shield made of bull's hide stretched tight
and stained black; a grey falcon took wing on the
boss and again on the leather. If she was in pain,
or exhausted, neither showed. Life glowed from
her as it did from her father in the moments after
battle. A crow's feather fluttered in her hair,
braided in haste and not meant to last but a statement
in itself.

Dubornos felt Cunomar stiffen and chose to
ignore it. Like first love, the first battle comes only
once and should be savoured at its freshest. He
gave the salute of one warrior to another and saw
it returned, joyfully.

'How many?' he asked.

'Eight,' said her mother. In her eyes, pride outshone
concern for the day and the lack of
Venutios. 'Eight clean kills that I saw and as many
wounded. Beyond doubt she is a warrior. She has
outmatched her father. He killed only three in his
first battle and that was considered many.'

Cunomar's pony jerked its head against a jabbed mouth. Hail whined, a high, keening note,
out of kilter with the day. Dubornos felt surprised
delight and let it show. 'She has outmatched all of
us,' he said, 'and all of the champions, going back
to Cassivellaunos who defeated Caesar. If you tell
me how it was, I'll make a song of it for the winter
fires.'

'Later.' Cygfa's mother had an eye for Cunomar,
who had seen his chance for fame dismantled.
Only in a tight space -like the valley, and with the
legionaries holding their own lives worthless,
could kills in such numbers be assured. Such an
opportunity came but once in each generation and
he had missed it. Hail keened for him still, giving
voice to his pain.

Cwmfen said, 'We must find Caradoc first.
If we're going to meet him at the head of the river,
we should go faster.'

Her horse was tired and nodding lame on a foreleg. She pushed it on towards a small rocky
crag that bulged out into the path. Her attention
was all on her daughter, on the recent past and the
future, too little of it on the present, where a leather thong the thickness of a man's thumb lay snake-like across the path and was lifted, expertly,
to trip her horse. She did not fall, but the peck and
stumble threw her off balance and caused a small
flurry of confusion in the horses behind.

Unlike the women, Dubornos was not fatigued
from battle. A lifetime's training in combat and
the inner prescience of a singer made him throw
his horse sideways even as he drew his sword. The movement saved his life and the club that had aimed for his head struck his left shoulder, numbing
his arm. His horse was battle-trained. It
completed the full turn to face the danger at his back. An auxiliary stood astride the path, club
raised for another strike. Behind him stood a tall,
slender man, muddy and blood-streaked from
battle but lacking device or helmet plumes that' might give ready identification. He wore Roman
mail but that meant nothing; half the tribes wore
stolen cavalry armour into battle. In the first
moment, seeing only the lean outline of the face
and the straight, blue-black hair, Dubornos
thought it was Luain mac Calma with his hair
unbound, unaccountably stripped of his dreamer's
brow-thong, and raised his hand in greeting. Then, in a gesture the singer had seen three times
before, that he had spent half a sweating, weeping
day bringing to the forefront of his mind so that
his fellow dreamers might know it as intimately,
the man he loathed most in the world pursed
his lips and touched his thumb to the centre of his
chest and, nodding a little, as if to an inner voice,
said, simply, 'Now.'

Recognition exploded into action. Dubornos
hurled his horse at the club-man, intent on
murder. He reined back only as a dozen armed
Thracian auxiliaries rose out of the heather before
him.

'Take them,' said the decurion. 'The governor
wants them all alive.'

They fought; it was what they lived for. Cunomar
was the most vulnerable and all three warriors
knew it. They tried to make a circle holding him at
the centre but were too few to achieve it and the
boy did nothing to help. From the first, he had
counted twenty auxiliaries and seen his chance to win honour greater than his sister's. More than that, he had within his reach the man whom half
a battlefield of proven warriors had tried to kill
without success. He flung himself at the hated
decurion and the combat; such as it was, lasted
exactly as long as it took for a boy on a pony to
reach an unmounted man, to be unhorsed with
expert precision and held fast with a blade tight at
his throat. Cunomar struggled and bit and the
man laughed, and then didn't.

'Stop!' 

The command came in Latin, from an officer
whose word was law and temper short. The man
opposite Dubornos hesitated and died for it, his
head split from temple to nose. The impact
shuddered along the singer's arm even as he
dragged the blade free and turned on the man's
companion.

'No.' The decurion's knife flashed. Cunomar
screamed aloud. Blood welled from his ear where
the lower half of the lobe was suddenly slit.
Shouting to be heard, the officer said again, 'Stop.
Lay down your weapons. The child will die if you
don't.' He said it twice, the second time in
passable Ordovician.

Dubornos raised his blade and turned in to the
enemy. Cwmfen spun her horse broadside in front
of him, blocking his attack. 'Dubornos! Do as he
says. He'll kill Cunomar else.'

'He'll kill him anyway. He'll kill all of us.' The
enemy moved around them. Ducking sideways,
Dubornos smashed his shield into a man's face
and swung his blade for the retreating head. 'You
know who this is. Better to die here in battle than
hanged at the fort and fed to their hounds.'

'No!' The decurion's voice cut through the clash
of iron as Dubornos' blade was turned. 'No. I know
he is Caradoc's son. No harm will come to him here
by our hand if you give up your weapons. I swear it.'

For that voice alone, one could kill; for the
taunting arrogance of an officer, of victor to
vanquished, he should have died a thousand
deaths. Cygfa was nearest to him. The battle-rage
lived within her and she could have killed him in a
stroke. Her sword arm was still, held rigidly so by
her mother.

Cwmfen flung her shield in Dubornos' face.
Anger ran through her as clearly as it did her
daughter, but tempered by reason and a vast,
unassailable pride. Here, now, one could so easily
see why Caradoc had once loved her.

'You will stop,' she said. 'Your oath holds you.
If you die, Cunomar dies also. Therefore you are
oath-bound to live.'

It may have been true. All the dreamers of
Mona could have taken a month of nights to argue
the point in law and constitution. In the moments
of decision, it was Cwmfen's unbending will that
swayed him. Hating himself, Dubornos reversed
his blade and sheathed it. The decurion spoke
once in Latin. Around him, men lowered their
weapons. The chaos of combat resolved. Out of
murder grew calm, but for the place just beyond
the rock where Hail, who spoke no Latin and had
no concept of surrender, hurled himself in toothbared
silence at the nearest auxiliary.

'Longinus, no!'

It was the decurion who shouted. He spoiled the
attention of both hound and man, but not enough.
A blade flashed, once. Impossibly, the old hound
who had come unscathed through more battles
than most living warriors was caught by the full
length of its edge. Iron smashed through living
flesh. A dozen ribs disintegrated and the lungs
beneath them hissed empty of air. Blood rose like
a fountain and rained down, patterning the
heather. White-faced, the auxiliary said, 'Julius,
I'm sorry-' and his words were lost in the noise.

The scream of a dying beast is no different from
that of a warrior. It shattered the day, falling to a rasping moan as the great hound collapsed onto the path and lay writhing on his wounded side,
fighting to draw air and live. A dozen men, two
women and a boy who had heard the same sound
from countless throats throughout the morning heard it now in silence and with appalled regret.
The reputation of the Boudica's war hound had
spread among the legions no less widely than the name of the woman at whose side he fought, and
the men of Rome were not without honour or
respect for a valiant enemy.

Dubornos slid from his horse and no effort was
made to stop him. He had lost his own dagger,
thrown in the first moments of fighting and lodged
still in the chest of an elderly auxiliary. Kneeling,
he reached instead for his blade. A hand on his arm stopped him. He looked up, cursing. Protest dried in his throat. 

The world inverted. Kneeling opposite him was
the decurion of the Thracian cavalry, rider of the
pied horse, his face the ugly yellowed white of a man in death-shock. Cunomar, sobbing, had been
passed to the auxiliary who had killed Hail. The man looked as if his life had ended. The decurion himself knelt opposite Dubornos without
ceremony or protection. On his open hand,
reversed to present the hilt, lay his dagger. An
arm's length away, beneath smooth brown skin, the beat of his heart pulsed, too fast, through the
great vessels of his neck.

In his mind, in the forefront of his being, so that
only his will held it other, Dubornos lifted the
blade and rammed it home, burying the shining
sharpness in flesh and blood and, spinal bone,
snuffing out for ever the life of an enemy whose
mere presence was an insult to the gods and to the
memories of those he had killed. His oath stopped
him, and the low, grief-heavy voice of the other man,
speaking Eceni in a way the singer had not
heard since childhood, untarnished by the
southern and western dialects of the war. Even
Breaca no longer spoke so.

'You'll have to do it. I can't remember the words
of the invocation.'

It is not given a singer to read the soul in the
way of a dreamer. Even if it were, a full life's
history cannot be seen in a single meeting of eyes,
but enough can pass to know and be known, for
the moment of recognition, of appalling, blinding
horror, for immutable loathing to garner also pity
and a measure of terrible understanding.

Numbly, Dubornos reached for the dagger. The
blade was still sticky with Cunomar's blood.
The hilt was of bronze, fashioned in the shape of
a falcon, with jet beads for the eyes. One had been
lost and reset imperfectly. The singer noticed it
with the dreamlike clarity with which everything
came to him in that moment. Testing the blade, he
found it as keen as the flaying blades of the
dreamers, which are daily honed sharp enough to
shave with.

Hail lay stretched on the heather between them,
not screaming now, but whimpering his pain. The
decurion passed a hand over the old hound's head,
speaking words in a language older than Latin,
older than the Eceni tongue of his boyhood. The
hound whined as he had on the path, recognizing
a scent long missed and not understanding its
source. He thrust his muzzle into a known and
long-sought palm and was held with care.
Dubornos found himself weeping and chose not to
stem the tears. Through a throat too tight for
steady words, he said, 'We need to turn his head to
the west.'

'Help me, then.'

They turned him together, taking care for his
pain, and the hound sighed at the end. Dubornos
found his voice again, and his training of decades.
The invocation to Briga may be spoken by any,
but sung only by those trained on Mona. With his
whole being, he sang it, lifting the words high over
the mountains so that all those left alive after the
battle might hear and know that a great soul
passed from this world to the other in the
company of the god to whom.his life had been
given. At the peak, when the song was greatest,
Dubornos slid the falcon blade carefully along the
great hound's throat, letting the last bright splash
of life-blood spill to the heather. His eyes were on
the decurion, who did not see him.

'You are Caradoc's brother.'

'You know that's not true.'

'I am telling you what I will put in the written
reports for the governor, that you are brother to
the rebel and that this is his wife and both of his
children. It is known he has two.'

'No. Cwmfen is no-one's wife. Even Scapula
must know by now that such a state does not
exist. Our women live as they will and love whom
they choose. They are not owned by men, nor we
by them.'

They were speaking Latin, which made it easier
to forget what had just passed between them, and
they were standing apart, which made it less of a
farce than it might have been. The majority of the
auxiliaries had been assigned the collecting of
rocks, to make a burial cairn for the hound.
Cwmfen and Cygfa had been disarmed.

Dubornos had given his weapon personally to
the decurion, who had admired the hilt. The
officer had recovered his composure. In a knowing
parody of the formal introductions of the
dreamers, he had said, 'I am Julius Valerius
Corvus, acting commander of the Ala Prima
Thracum. Longinus Sdapeze, duplicarius of the
first troop, is the officer who holds the boy. You
should be wary of him. His horse was killed
beneath him today and he loved it as a brother. We
will introduce the others to you later.' And then he
had made his statement, which was nonsense.

The moment of shared understanding, of meeting
and possible compassion, had passed. Valerius
was the officer again. For the purposes of ambush,
he had dispensed with his decurion's cloak but the
glamour of leadership shone from him, as it did
from Breaca before battle; the certainty of victory
that could slide into arrogance were it not
tempered in her so clearly by love. In the man who
called himself Julius Valerius, there was no love.
Dubornos despised him for it.

He said, 'I have no brother, as you well know.
My sisters are both dead at your hand.'

Valerius sighed, pointedly. 'Warrior, are you
tired of life?'

The singer held his enemy's gaze and found,
surprisingly, that he did not flinch. 'Would you
like to return my father's blade and see which of
us wishes most to die?'

The decurion smiled. Irony tainted a genuine humour. With studied courtesy he said, 'Thank
you, but no. Later, perhaps, but not today. I have
particularly precise orders and they do not permit
the indulgence of killing Caradoc's relatives.'

'I'm not--'

'Dubornos, will you listen and try to understand?
I know exactly who and what you are; that
is not in question. You should know that if we
capture a warrior of the enemy, he, or she, will be
passed to Scapula's inquisitors, who travel with
him for just this eventuality. You may not have
seen the results of their work but you should take
my word for it that anyone so questioned wishes
for death long before the sun sets on the first day
- and there are many days. The order extends to
every living captive with the sole exception of
those who are direct kin of the rebel leaders. These
are to be transported unharmed to Rome to await
the emperor's pleasure. So, I say again that here
and now we have taken Caradoc's brother, his
wife and his two children. If you wish to deny this,
I won't stop you; your life is yours to prolong as
you wish. I would suggest you do not extend the
same discourtesy to the women, or to the boy.'

It was a day for god-sent choices, none of them
easy. Dubornos asked, 'What happens in Rome?'

'That depends on the emperor. I couldn't say,
but even public crucifixion would be better than
what will happen here if you are found to be, say,
a dreamer from the rebel isle of Mona.'

'Or a singer?'

'The distinction is not one that Scapula will
recognize.'

Dubornos had trained for years in the ways of
the dream. At times and in places it was given him
to hear the voices of the gods, or to see their sign.
Praying to Nemain, whom he favoured,
he looked around at the grey rock and purpled
wash of the mountains, at the flesh-greased smoke
that rose from the valley, drifting south on a light
wind, at the countless crows gathering to feast on
the dead. He was considering his death and the
means by which it could be brought most swiftly
closer when a flicker on a far hillside drew his eye.
There, partly hidden by berried rowan and rock, a
handful of white cloaks flew in the wind of their
owners' riding: the honour guard of Mona. At
their head was Caradoc and at his side, freshly
mounted on a new horse and with the gift of a
Roman legionary shield, rode the scout of the
Brigantes whom Dubornos had last seen cantering
down a mountain track towards a lost battle. All
rode north, at speed.

It was a small thing on which to hang a life, but
it was enough. The decurion had seen the riders
with him. His eyes met the singer's and Dubornos
said, 'It seems my brother lives to continue the
war.'

There was a moment before the words and their
meaning were clear, then Valerius saluted. On his
face was the barest mockery, of whom it was
impossible to tell. 'Thank you. I will enter it so in
the reports.'

The horses were brought forward. The wrists of
the captives were bound. They were helped to
mount and were led at a slow walk down the hillside. On the path behind, a cairn of rocks the
height of a mounted man marked the last resting
place of a battle hound.

XVI.

'Breaca? Breaca, wake up.'

The night was dark, with no moon. In her
dreams, Caradoc slew both Scapula and the pied
decurion and rode back to her with their heads
wrapped in his cloak as a gift. Delivered to Mona,
the head of the decurion had become that of
Amminios, Caradoc's older brother who had sided
with Rome. It sang in Latin and - mocked her,
promising vengeance for a death in which she had
taken no part.

'Breaca? Can you hear me?'

She stirred, glad to escape the dream. In the
half-world of waking, she knew that her daughter
suckled her left breast and should be moved to the
right and that cool fingers gripped her wrist,
firmly. With some thought, she recognized Airmid's
touch; it was how they had always woken each
other. Sleep-sodden, she opened her eyes.

'Caradoc?' she asked. 'Has he won?'

'I don't know.' Airmid stood at the bedside,
shapeless in her cloak, her hair black to merge
with the night. 'There's a messenger waiting on the
far side of the strait. I've sent Sorcha with the ferry
to bring him over. I thought you might want to
greet him.'

I thought you might want to ... I have seen you
force yourself to eat these past three days, for your
child's sake when your body would have refused
food for worry, and I have watched you walk the
slopes above the strait from dawn to dusk that you
might see a messenger riding down the far mountain
and know the message that much sooner.

The promise of news brought her awake, and
Graine with her. The child gurned and fell silent,
feeding. Airmid fetched a torch and lit it from
the fire. Breaca followed her along the path to the
jetty where the ferry would put in. Rain, the young
hound who was son to Hail, ran ahead, snuffing
the night; all day he had been restless and was
better out. At the standing stone on the hillside,
they stopped, looking down onto the straits below.
The barest outline of the ferry was visible, a sleek
shape sliding black on black-like a hunting otter.
The backwash of the steering oar stirred green
light from the water behind, a gift of the sea god
Manannan to fishers and ferrywomen that they
might see and be seen. The wind blew briskly from
the north, lifting the tidal swell. In the quiet of the
night, they heard the sound of retching and
the soft consternation that followed from Sorcha
who could not understand that her beloved sea
might cause some to feel ill.

The ferry reached them. Wood bumped lightly
on wood and a rope was made fast. Sorcha
stepped ashore and turned to offer a hand to her
passenger. 'This is Lythas,' she said. 'Venutios has
sent him with a message.' And then, redundantly,
'He's been sick.'

Torchlight showed a small, neat young man of
Ardacos' build, who had, indeed, been sick
although that was only the latest hardship in his
recent past and not the greatest. His tunic was
torn at the shoulder and hip as if he had rolled
through thorns, or slid down a rocky hillside, and
his left forearm was bruised along its length, but
even these were only markers to the upheavals
within. He finished the last bout of sickness and
hauled himself ashore. Exhaustion lined his
eyes and the hollows carved beneath them from
days and nights on horseback. Breaca studied
them as she might any other warrior returning
from a skirmish, but nothing protected her from
the shock that rocked him when he looked up and
realized who she was. His message, a day old at
least, rushed to the front of his mouth, and he
would not, or could not, speak it aloud.

'Tell me,' said Breaca. 'It is best I know quickly.
Is he dead?'

'No, lady, not dead. But perhaps better if he were.' 

Airmid grasped her arm. By the pressure of
those fingers, Breaca stayed upright and kept her
fear hidden. 'He's taken, then? Scapula has him?'

I will kill them all. I will unleash such vengeance
as has never been --

The messenger swallowed. 'Not yet.' With
evident reluctance, he said, 'Cartimandua has him
and will give him to the governor as a guest-gift.
They lured him north by treachery. A messenger
was sent - Vellocatus - to meet Caradoc at the
river of the Lame Hind. He carried news that
Venutios was held captive by the Fourteenth
legion and that was why he wasn't able to bring
the three thousand--'

It was too much and made too little sense.
Questions tumbled over themselves. 'Vellocatus is
loyal to Venutios. How could he-' And then, as
the strategies of a summer collapsed at her feet,
'The three thousand didn't come? So we lost to
Scapula? Or did Caradoc beat him and then take
the warriors north to rescue Venutios?'

Airmid's fingers still encircled her wrist, pressing firmly as if waking her from a second sleep.
'Breaca, forgive me, but we should move. Lythas
has ridden through two nights to reach us. He
needs food and water and perhaps some ale. His
message will make more sense if he gives it as it
was told him and he'll do that best when he is
seated before a fire with a drink inside him and
out of sight and smell of the sea.'

The man said nothing but exhaustion and
gratitude lit his smile equally. Airmid said, 'Come
with me. A place is prepared,' and they followed
her, with the hound behind.

Airmid had been awake a while, it seemed, and
expecting company. The place she had prepared
was her own, set on the western edge of the settlement,
the place of deepest dreaming. It was built
with stone walls and turf on the roof and a burn
ran within an arm's stretch of the doorway, keeping
her close to the waters of Nemain. Inside, a fire
was already laid and lit, with folded hides placed
at three points around it for seating. Lacking other
light, the walls were in shadow and it was impossible
to see what else of Airmid's was present,
but the scents of rosemary and sage, of pine resin
and sea-wrack, mingled faintly with the rising
smoke. This was not a usual place in which to
greet a messenger, but it was not a usual message,
nor a usual time. They were still between midnight
and dawn. Hounds stirred, and night hunting
beasts, but the dreamers, for the most part, slept
on in the great-house and no apprentices had been
woken to serve the messenger with food and ale as would ordinarily have been the case.

Airmid excused herself briefly and returned
with a fresh cloak and a beaker of water for
Lythas, but not yet food. She said, 'Maroc is
preparing meat and oat bannocks. It'll be ready
soon but you should give us the message now, if
you will, so we can act without delay.'

The man was willing, seeing a day's rest ahead
of him. By the light of the fire he seemed less sick,
his face less pinched, his eyes less haunted. He sat
opposite Breaca on the cushion of hides and
relayed his message, word-perfect, as it had been
told him.

'The first thing you need to know is that
Vellocatus is Cartimandua's man. He has been
from the start, from before Venutios ever returned
to us from Mona. He has been her eyes and ears
in our meetings, her voice in council, saying only
what he was given permission to say by her. He
told her of the salmon-trap and the plan to
raise the two thousand to aid Caradoc. When he
suggested that he go north to request aid from the
Selgovae, the idea came first from her. It gave him
a reason to travel ahead of Venutios without
arousing suspicion.

'When the time came to gather the warriors,
Venutios found himself betrayed. Two cohorts  of
the Fourteenth and a wing of Batavian cavalry
surrounded him and his sworn companions. They
couldn't condemn him - he is father to
Cartimandua's child and they deem him royal for
that - but they have hanged all his closest kin and
companions from the gateposts of his roundhouse
and he is forced to stay inside while they rot. I was
spared because I am no-one, neither kin nor sworn
spear-chief, not even known as a friend.'

He spoke this last as steadily as he had the rest,
as if it, too, were part of a message learned by
heart. His face, moulded tallow in the firelight,
was a mask of death and damaged pride.

Breaca said, 'Whom did you lose in the
hangings?'

He looked at her sharply. 'My father, my sister,
two of my cousins and ... a friend. A good
friend.'

'And you think it would have been better to die
with your kin and those you loved rather than to
live, to fight, perhaps to avenge their deaths.' The
Boudica nodded, her gaze lost in the heart of the
fire. She spoke thoughtfully, as if to the glowing
embers or to herself alone. 'It may be that each of
them considered the shining honour of it as they
choked out their last air on the end of the rope. It
may be there would have been another, similarly
overlooked, who would have had the courage to
ride out of an armed and guarded encampment if
you had been considered dangerous and had been
honoured with the same death as your kin. But it
was not so. The gods chose you to live and to bear
the message.'

She looked up. A veil of flame separated them.
He could not look away. 'We are not given the
choice of how and when we must serve, only
whether we do so with courage and so perhaps
succeed, or with fear, in which case we will
certainly fail. You have shown courage so far, but
if you wish to ride back and give yourself up to the
legate of the Fourteenth legion there is no-one here
who will stop you. Alternatively, you could continue
to act with the courage you have shown so
far and pray for the chance to see those you cared
for avenged, their families and their land freed
from oppression and slavery. These are your
choices. If you had to pick one now, which would
it be?'

He stared at her. Simply to ask was an insult,
and yet she was the Boudica, whose honour could
not be impugned. 'I will choose to fight,' he said. 'Always.'

'Thank you.' She smiled and his world became
a lighter place. 'Then tell us what you know of the
battle in the mountains, how it went for Caradoc and the warriors of the western tribes.'

He shrugged. 'We don't know very much, and
all of that is second-hand from those who captured Caradoc. The rest we must guess.' He Hdrank water from the beaker and began again the rolling lilt of the trained messenger, speaking the words of another as if they were his own.
'It's clear that, without Venutios, the salmon-trap in the mountains failed. Caradoc and the
warriors of the tribes fought with outstanding
courage and left behind them eight or nine dead of
the enemy for each one of their own, but the
smashing fist of the trap could not close and when
Caradoc realized they had been betrayed, he
ordered the tribes to leave the field. Better to liv
and fight on than die in a hopeless cause.'


'It is always so. He had arranged it beforehand.'

'Yes. Venutios knew it, and so Cartimandua
knew it too, through her spy. She alone knew both
sides; the setting of the salmon-trap and that it
would fail. She sent Vellocatus so that he would
come upon Caradoc as if by happy chance just as
he was leaving the battlefield to join the warriors
of Mona and the spear-leaders of the other guards.
He told him....' He slowed and drank again,
gathering himself. This time his gaze rose to
Breaca's face, but not her eyes. 'He told him that
the Boudica was in danger, that Cartimandua had
lured you north with a tale of Caradoc's capture,
but that you were travelling slowly for the sake of
the babe and that if they - Caradoc and Vellocatus
- rode swiftly, with little encumbrance and only a
few of the honour guard for company, he might
overtake you before you reached the strongholds
of the north. He went. How could he not?'

Breaca said, 'That's madness. I wouldn't go
north, and even if I did, I wouldn't take Graine.
Why would Caradoc believe it?f'

'Because they told him you were in danger and
that you had gone believing the same of him.
And because the message was given by Vellocatus,
whom he trusted, and who had brought with him,
as evidence of good faith, the salmon carved in
blue stone that is the mark of Venutios.'

'Taken by force.'

'Of course, but he couldn't know that.'

Airmid said, 'He wouldn't ask. His only care
would be for Breaca and Graine. It is his weakness
and they know it. As Caradoc is ours.' The
dreamer sat in the shadows beyond reach of
the fire. The stream ran behind her, a liquid song
in the night. For nearly twenty years, she had lived
and dreamed here, and when she spoke in this
place the god spoke with her, changing the air.
Speaking thus, she asked, 'Lythas, what symbol do
you bring as proof of your good faith?'

Freed from the burden of the message, the
messenger had relaxed. One could see more
clearly the man in him, through the frightened
youth. He was older than he had first seemed. 'I have brought no token. There was none left of any
worth beyond Venutios' word and mine that what
I have said is the truth.' 

He leaned towards Breaca, his face flushed. His
smile, and the margin of hope it offered her, were
worth more than any ring or brooch and he knew
it.

'Caradoc is held alone and well guarded,' he
said. 'It would not be possible to rescue him with
an army. The Fourteenth are waiting for just such
an attack. It would be suicide for the warriors and
Caradoc would die before they ever came close to
him. But a small group, perhaps the Boudica and
one or two of Ardacos' bear-warriors, might be
able to reach him. If not that, I believe - and this@ does not come from Venutios but from me alone - that there is still time to talk to Cartimandua. She
is a mother and she has protected Venutios from
Rome though she loathes him and he her. She
would understand a plea from the Boudica as a
mother and a lover. For that, she might return
Caradoc to you alive.'

Breaca said, 'Rome would never allow it.'

Lythas shrugged. 'Rome hasn't got the power to
stop it. The legions travel slowly and against
resistance - Gwyddhien's falcons and Ardacos'
she-bears harry them as they march so they must
build secure camps at night and cannot move
faster than the slowest legionaries for fear that
the rear of the column will be cut off and
destroyed. If we were to ride fast in a small group,
we could still reach Cartimandua days ahead of
Scapula.'

'But why would she agree to let Caradoc go?
She hates him. He refused her a child and she has
never forgiven him. For that alone, she'll see him
crucified and be glad of it.'

'Possibly, but she is less influenced by her own
petty jealousies than she was and more aware of
the pressures of rulership. She commands more
spears than any other from the east coast to the
west and that has its cost. If they revolt, she's lost.
Moreover, she has to contend with the northern
Brigantes who are oath-sworn to Venutios. They
number thousands and are close to rebellion. To
free Caradoc now would raise her standing with
them, possibly enough to prevent an uprising. It
would not harm her in the eyes of Rome. She's
already saved them once from defeat; they can't
reasonably ask more.'

In entirely her own voice, Airmid murmured,
'And, of course, Rome only ever asks what is
reasonable.'

Reaching into the back of the house, the
dreamer brought forward three torches. One by
one, she lit them from the fire. Dark became light
and the scents of pine resin, herbs and tallow
sharpened and became stronger, clearing the air,
banishing the last traces of fear and desperation.
Lythas caught Breaca's eye and smiled again, a
willing if weary conspirator. Across the fire, an
agreement was in the making: he would return to
find Caradoc and she with him. It only remained
to convince Airmid and the other dreamers of the
wisdom of it.

Airmid's shadow fell between them, breaking the
moment. She said, 'Lythas, you have done all that
was asked of you and more. If you are to guide us 
back to find Caradoc, we should leave you now to
eat and rest and find strength for the journey. If you
wait, Maroc will bring what is needed.'

He smiled gladly. 'Thank you.'

Breaca stood, raised by relief. Where she had
expected argument, there was the beginning of a
plan. She would go north, there was no doubt of
that; the only question was who could safely
accompany her. 'We can't take Graine,' she said,
voicing her first thought. 'We'll need to find a wet-nurse, someone who can care for her properly.'

Airmid said, 'There is Sorcha, the ferrywoman.
Her newest son is near weaning and her milk
flows now as freely as it did when he was born.
She would have Graine gladly and care for her as
her own. Maroc and Luain mac Calma will take
care of her other needs and her safety. Neither one
would let her come to harm in our absence.'

Because our absence may be permanent. If we go,
we may never come back. And we will go, both of
us together, because we must. 'Will you come outside with me? If we're going to leave by dawn,
there are things we must do.'

They stepped out of the house of stone and
earth into a world filled with dreamers. Luain mac
Calma was there, who could have ruled Hibernia
and chose instead the guardianship of Mona. With
him was Maroc, the Elder, who had once been to
Rome to see the enemy close at hand. They stood
on either side of the door, naked to the waist as if
for the slaughter of bullocks or swine. Each bore a
hook-bladed knife with the back edge honed to
razor sharpness. Behind them, two of the younger
apprentices held ropes of twisted hide. Airmid
nodded as the door-skin fell behind her. Maroc
pushed it open and entered, smiling.

Breaca spun and was held fast. 'Airmid? What
is this?'

'He's lying. It's a trap. They mean to take you as
they have taken Caradoc.' Airmid spoke in the
voice not of the god, but of absolute certainty.

'How can you be sure?'

'Because that's what I'm for, to be sure of these things. If you know how to look it's clear. He's
well trained, but not well enough. If I were to
guess, I would say Heffydd has had him for a
while. He's the only dreamer trained on Mona who would turn our knowledge against us. If you think back to when we first met the ferry, you will
remember that Lythas was happy to meet your
eye, but he would not meet mine, except right at the beginning when he was still in the boat and did not know who I was. You saw the fear that came
straight afterwards but thought it was for you and
the pain he brought, as he meant you to. He's a clever man and not lacking in courage, but he is Cartimandua's to the deepest part of his soul. If
you go to her and plead for Caradoc's life, she will
give both of you to Rome.'

'You knew this from the start?'

'Yes. It's why I didn't bring him food. If he had eaten with us, the guest laws would have made it
harder to do what we must.' 

Dawn was near. In the impoverished light,
Breaca looked into the eyes of the woman she had
known for all her lifetime and did not recognize
the dark in the soul who looked back. The bleakness of it shocked her. Such a look belonged on the
battlefield, late in the day after the first fire of
battle-rage had waned. It is a thing shared by
those of both sides who have survived, who have
killed and will go on killing, who have maimed
and will maim again, who have seen enemy and
friends die fast, or slowly, and are resigned to the same end. To Breaca's certain knowledge, Airmid
had been in battle only once, and the fact that
she had lived through it at all was thanks to good
fortune and the protection of the gods, not the
dreamer's skill with sword and shield. Combat
was not her strength; healing, not death, was her
province.

From the hut came the sound of a struggle and
a breathless scream.

Breaca tried again to reach the door. 'Let me do
this,' she said. 'It's not your work.'

Airmid would not let her pass. 'More my work
than yours. The herb-smoke from the torches does
half the job and you couldn't stay in there for
much longer. It was already affecting your judgement. And what we do here is not killing in
war. You haven't ever slain a warrior when the
battle-heat wasn't on you, and this is not a good
time to start. You would carry the guilt and it
would weaken you when we most need you whole
for the ride north and whatever comes after. Go to
Sorcha and tell her what Graine needs to be safe
and happy. Whatever else must be done we will
know by the time you return.'

'Then we're still going north?'

'Yes, I believe so. Caradoc has been captured,
that much would seem to be true, although I think
it may be more recent than Lythas would have us
believe. But the message was not sent by Venutios.
What we must find is how best to get to him,
knowing that Cartimandua expects us.'

'And what of Lythas afterwards? What will we
do with him?'

Airmid shook her head."There will be no Lythas
afterwards. The carrion beasts will have what
remains.'

Sorcha was awake in her cabin near the shore,
feeding her son. Big and broad-boned, she lived
for the sea. Her mother was Belgic, an escaped
slave; her father the Hibernian seamaster who had
given the woman both reason and means to
abandon the home she had known for two
decades. All of their seven children had been born
at sea and six of them sailed it still. Sorcha was the
youngest. Her choice to settle on land came late
and for much the same reason as her mother had
taken to the sea. Her man was a warrior and
had died in a skirmish in the early summer. In his
absence, she raised their three children in the
company of the few others who were born and
raised on Mona, and she manned the ferry across
the straits as she had done every year since the
legions' invasion.

She met Breaca's request to act as Graine's wet-nurse with the same willingness with which she
sailed. Motherhood came easily and she was
already regretting the growing up of her infant.
More deeply, she knew what it was to lose the
light of her soul to the enemy, what it did to head
and heart. She stood with her back to a wall, rocking her child in one arm, studying Breaca in much
the same way as she studied the swell of the sea.

'Are you the right one to go for your man?' she
asked. 'If you see him, you'll not hold back. If it's
both of you they want, that's the way they'll get
you, using him.'

Breaca said, 'Airmid will come. She won't be so
readily blinded.'

'No?' Sorcha's hair was copper, her brows a
shade paler, almost lost in the sun-worn freckles of
her skin. She raised one of them now. 'Unless they
take you. Then I'd say she'll be worse.'

'Maybe.' It was always there, hanging over
everything. One took risks, daily, of death,
captivity, torture, and prepared in heart and mind
as much as one could. One could not do the same
for the equal risks to those one loved; no such
preparation was possible. Breaca thought of
Caradoc and his last words on parting. I love you,
never forget. For your freedom and that of our
children, I will do anything and everything, to the
ends of the earth. Her heart lay shattered in
the cage of her chest and words did not mend it.

The cabin was built of green oak, pitted with
knots. For a sharp, haunted mind that sought the
patterns in everything, the whorls moved and
resolved into bears and blades and crucified men.
Breaca stared at the shifting shapes, lost in a past that was irretrievable and a future that could not
be known.

Sorcha's child fell asleep at the breast. With
unhurried competence, the ferrywoman wrapped
her son in a lambskin and laid him on the bracken
in the high-sided bed with his siblings. A signal
bell rang faintly, chiming over the murmur of
mother and children: the request from the mainland
for the ferry. Sorcha raised a patch of
blue-stained calf hide and looked through the
peephole thus uncovered, which gave a direct view
of the jetties at both sides of the strait. Pulling on
a rope, she raised a signal that could be seen
on the far side.

'That's Ardacos. He's there now with his bear-warriors.
If he's come this far, Gwyddhien and
Braint won't be far behind.' She turned back into
the room, her jaw set bluntly. 'So that's five of you
going, and not one whole if another is lost.'

'No.' Breaca took her turn at the peephole.
With her eye to the knot, she said, 'Love isn't
always a weakness.'

She believed it. First and last, more than care of
the land or the gods or the desperate need not to
see a people made slaves and lackeys to Rome, it
was love that bound the inner circle that made her
life whole. Ardacos had been her lover in the years
before Caradoc and Airmid had been her first
love, long before him. Ardacos was Braint's lover
now as Gwyddhien was Airmid's and all four were
sworn to the Boudica, to protect and to serve until
death and beyond. The mesh and weave of given 
hearts was impossible to unravel, nor would any
of them wish to try. Only a stranger would not be
pulled into it and no stranger could ever be trusted
with what came ahead.

The ferrywoman reached her cloak from its peg, Her wide, sea-raw fingers pinned it high on the
right shoulder. At the door, having thought her
words clear, she paused.

'Just remember, while you're away, that there's
more lives depend on you living to fight on than that one man. It would be no honour to his memory to
lose a land and its people because he is gone.'

The land of the Brigantes was grey. In the lowlands,
grey mist leaked over barren grey rock. In 
the high mountains, which were never as high as
the startling, snow-bright peaks of the west, thin grey slush rendered hard ground mud and made
sodden the lying firewood so that, for the last two
nights of a five-night journey, Breaca and those
who rode with her ate raw the hares and small fish
that Ardacos had hunted and slept in pairs sitting upright,
sharing cloaks and the warmth of their bodies.

They were thirteen, the five whom Sorcha had
identified, with two of Gwyddhien's Silures to hold the horses ready within reach of the enemy
and five of the bear-warriors, hand-picked for
their skill in the hunt. The thirteenth was Tethis, a
cousin of Ardacos' just past her long-nights and
not yet tested in battle. The reason for her coming
had not been apparent when they set out, but
Ardacos had brought her and no-one argued. On
the fifth day, they learned why she had come.

Through the length of the journey, Breaca and
those closest to her had considered the means by
which they would locate and free Caradoc. Each
of them had believed that he or she alone was
capable of penetrating the vast encampment on
the northern river where the Brigantes shared fires
and food with three cohorts of the Fourteenth
legion. A massed attack was impossible; the only
possible route was by stealth, but the question
remained as to who should go in and how they
would best avoid capture. Breaca could not go.
On that everyone was agreed; her height and her
colouring were too well known by the enemy and
there was no disguise in the world that would
effectively conceal her when the Brigantes were
expecting her to come. The others did not share
her notoriety, but in truth each of them was
known to the enemy and none could plausibly
pass as either Roman or Brigante. Tethis had
deferred to her elders and those with greater
experience of battle, saying nothing until the
morning of the fifth day when the whole group lay
on a hillside within site of the camp and had not
yet found a way to do what was needful. Then she
showed what she could do.

She had been born and raised in the land of the
Caledonii far to the north and had never yet set
foot on a battlefield. No-one, Roman or Brigante,
had ever seen her. Better than that, she had the
small size and dark colouring of the ancestors so
that, with a little planning, she could pass as one
of the Brigante girl children, not yet come to adulthood. Dressed in only a thong-belted tunic with
her legs streaked with mud and her hair flying
free, she became yet another urchin underfoot, to
be scolded and sent back to the fields, or, if close
to the Roman encampments, put to work as a
messenger, paid in tarnished copper coins and
later lured into a tent for work that would not b
paid.

From warrior to urchin, the transformation
took place before them and it was clear even to
Braint, who had been intent on something similar
with far less chance of success, that Tethis was
their best, if not their only, hope of reaching
Caradoc. The arguments had been abandoned and
the girl had left just before dawn, running down
over the grey hillside to vanish into the river-mist
that concealed the noisome chaos of the fort.

Throughout the long day, they waited, twelve
battle-proven warriors, while a girl who had not
yet won her spear walked alone among a thousand
legionaries and three times that many enemy
warriors. Tired, frustrated and eaten alive by
impatience, Breaca lay on her cloak on a ledge of
crumbling slate veiled by a swath of dying bracken
that lipped over from the hillside above. Straight
edges of rock dug into her flesh through the folds
of wool, autumn insects crawled from the bracken
to explore exposed patches of skin, ants laid a trail
a hand's breadth in front of her face. After a while,
she began to pray for rain, simply for a change in
the attacks on her person.

The rest of the group were no more comfortable.
Below and to the right, Braint lay close to
Ardacos, each on a similar slate outcrop. Others
lay within hailing distance, making hare-nests in
the damp bracken or lying out as Breaca did on
the rocky outcrops that littered the landscape.
One could choose soft lying and be wet, or remain
dry but cold and hard. Either way, the day
stretched each of them to the limits of their
endurance.

There were ways to pass the time. Breaca,
counted the crows that flapped like thrown rags in
the wind, tumbling down to the carrion feast of
hanged warriors below. In the afternoon, when the
wind backed to the east and rolled the stench of
those bodies up the hillside to choke the hidden
watchers, she began instead to count the dead, to
separate and identify men from women, adult
from child, blond hair from dark. They were not
close and they had hung in the wind for many
days so that she counted and re-counted and the
numbers were never twice the same, but the effort
kept her awake and alert while she waited, always,
for the shouted challenge and the clash of weapons
that would mean Tethis had failed.

'She's coming.'

Ardacos had moved since the morning. he
spoke from the bracken to Breaca's left. A moment
later, he raised his head so she could see him. He
was naked but for a belt and a loin-flap of
bearskin, his body lightly greased with goose fat
against the cold. He edged closer, flowing like
water over the rock, and, for a moment, the smel
of him covered the stench of putrefaction rising
from the valley. His face was lined and creased
with four decades' exposure to cold and biting
wind. His smile was a rare thing, given as a gift,
and she had learned to read it only after years in
his closest company. As he gave it now, it was a
preparation for disappointment.

'She's halfway up and alone,' he said. 'See . ..
there.' He pointed further south than she had been
looking. On the hillside, bracken shivered and was
still. A hunting fox would have made such a
movement, or a badger, caught abroad in daylight.
Ardacos chittered like an angry stoat and was
answered in kind.

Tethis ran the last few strides. She was alone
and looked neither hopeful nor happy.

'I don't care what she says. We will get him out.'

'No. He cannot be freed.'

'He can. It is only that we have not yet found
the means. One of us should go in and look again
at night when the guards are fewer.'

It was dusk. They had moved across to the other
side of the hill, out of sight of the encampment and
away from a wind that had come on suddenly
and flung the bracken flat. The bear-warriors and
Gwyddhien's Silures stood watch in a full circle.
The five and Tethis remained in the centre. The
girl had brought dry firewood; its collection had
been her reason to leave the camp. Ardacos
had dug a fire pit and they burned the wood for
warmth alone. None of them could have
stomached food.

An orange glow leaked, up from the pit. By its
light, they were all too pale, too worn. Breaca
ground her knife on her whetstone, a rhythmic
scratch and scrape that was lost on the wind. Without that much movement, she would have needed to walk, to squirm through the bracken, to
run, to take her blade and attack singlehandedly
the series of guard posts that stood between her
and the distant tent, now identified, where
Caradoc was held.

She sat across the fire from Tethis. The girl was
small, compact, collected and deeply moved
by what she had seen. She chewed her lip, thinking
what to say next. Ardacos asked a question in
the northern tongue that none amongst the others
understood and was answered cuttingly. Breaca
recognized only the name of Cartimandua, spoken
twice with heartfelt loathing. In the rest was
surprise, vehement assent and flat certainty, but no
hope.

At the end, they fell to a heavy silence until,
choosing his words, Ardacos said, 'She doesn't
want to tell you this because she's afraid it'll only
add to your grief, but I think you have to know.
The tent in which they hold Caradoc is set over an
outcrop of rock. They have him chained to it by
neck and ankles. The only way you could free him
would be to take a smith along who had time to
break the iron. Eight legionaries sleep in there, two awake at all times. They sit with him, talking,
or watching him sleep. His every move - every one
- is accompanied.' His eyes reflected more grief
than Breaca had ever seen. He said, 'I'm sorry.
Tethis is right. There's no way to get him out.'

'There must be. She just hasn't found it. Ask her
how she knows this.'

'I've already asked. She took him his meal. She
spoke with him while he ate it.' Ardacos paused.
His gaze met Airmid's, Gwyddhien's, Braint's
before it would meet hers. Whatever he saw there
gave him the strength he needed to continue.
Looking finally at her, he said, 'Tethis offered him
death. It was all she could give. She has a knife
and could have used it on him - and then herself -
before the legionaries could reach her. For him,
and for you, she would have done this.'

Cold crushed her, black, crawling ice, that
sucked heat from her body and the fire equally. It
took more courage than she had ever known to
ask, 'Why did she not?'

'He forbade it. The Romans hold hostages.
They have taken alive Cunomar and Cygfa,
Dubornos and Cwmfen, and hold them in another
place away from here. He has seen them, and they
have let him speak briefly with Cwmfen so that
he knows she has not yet been harmed, but he
doesn't know where they are now, or how Cygfa
fares, or Cunomar.'

Cunomar. Child of her heart, soft-haired spirit
of the gods. She had imagined him safe with
Dubornos, even now on Mona, guarding his sister
against his mother's eventual return. Her mind
protected her; reason rode over the all-engulfing
pain. She said, 'So if he dies, they will die, but they
will die anyway. He should have taken what Tethis
offered.'

'No.' Ardacos shook his head. He tried to speak
and stopped and swallowed and she had nearly
reached for him to drag the words out when he said, hoarsely, 'It's far worse than that. If Caradoc
dies, they will live, that's the promise. They will be
taken to Rome and held for a lifetime in an underground
prison, never seeing the light, nor free
water, nor the rising of the moon. It was
Cartimandua's idea. She knows that a warrior
does not disdain to die, however appalling the
circumstances, but that to be made to live in a
house such as Rome builds, without sight of the earth, the sky, the stars, for a lifetime is unthinkable.
They have promised him this and he believes it. To buy their deaths, and his, by whatever means, he will stay alive.'

Caradoc. Cunomar. Cygfa, who was her father born again as a woman. Numbly Breaca said, 'They will crucify him. All of them. They will take
them to Rome and make of it a spectacle. Five
of them, one after the other, a day apart, with him
last.'

'Yes. He believes so.'

It was too much. Pain rose in her like the bloating of decay. It grew up from her abdomen into
her chest, eating the air until she breathed through
a reed and barely that. It clamped round her neck
choking her, swelling her tongue and blocking her
mouth. It rose up through her cheeks and blocked
her eyes, depriving her even of the release of tears.
Her mouth, made the shape to say Caradoc and
then Cunomar and no sound came out.

Around her was silence. Nobody dared speak or
had any idea what to say. Nothing could be said.
A whispered voice she recognized later as her own
said, 'Hail was with them. He was guarding
Cunomar.'

Hail. Another in the litany of loss and death.
Ardacos was weeping. She had never seen him
weep. His tears fell where hers could not. Looking
round, she saw it in all of them, in Airmid,
Gwyddhien, Braint: a brightness of the eyes,
running over in the firelight as sap from cut bark.
Only Tethis, who had not known him, and whose
stillness, whose pallor, was now given reason, did
not weep. For her, because no-one else would giv
it voice, Breaca said, 'He was my war hound. Hail.
If Cunomar is taken, then he must be dead.'

Tight-voiced, the girl said, 'He is. I am to tell
you he died in battle protecting Cunomar and that
Dubornos sang the rites, for him. It was his voice
the warriors heard in the valleys as they were
leaving the battle of the salmon-trap.'

I will unleash such vengeance ... But what use
is vengeance when the world is in ashes and all is lost? Her heart stopped. When it started again and
she could speak, she said, 'Who killed him,
is it known?'

'The decurion of the Thracian cavalry. The one
who rides the pied horse.'

She had never known what it was truly to hate.
She knew it then, perfect and pure and alive with its own meaning. She heard it clearly in her own voice, saying, 'Then he will die, and Scapula with
him. They have not won. They will never win.'

'Caradoc said you would say that. It was his
message to you: never to let them win. And I was
to tell you that he loved you, that you were his
first thought and his last, for all time.'


III.

AUTUMN-WINTER AD 51.


XVII.

'Breaca, this isn't battle; there is no possibility of
an honourable death. If we're caught, Scapula will
make examples of us that will rock the tribes from
coast to coast, and that's the least of the dangers.
What we are trying hasn't ever been done and the
gods may not condone it. We risk the loss of not
only this life but all the ones still to come. You
were in my dream but these things are not fixed.
You don't have to join us.'

'Yes, I do. You dreamed a chance to find
Caradoc and bring him back. I won't jeopardize
that dream. The gods would not ask it of me, nor
should you.'

Breaca sat on a rotting stump on a river bank in
the rain. A fire burned on the gravel near the
water, the threading smoke lost in the spume from
the waterfall behind. The vestiges of the sunset
smeared old blood across the western horizon.

The world was full of blood and none of it hers.
She had not been killed, or even lightly wounded,
however often she threw herself at the enemy.
Those fighting on both sides had come to believe
her blessed by the gods. Her warriors followed her
into ruinous danger and most came out alive.
Legionaries by the dozen had died on her blade,
too weakened by fear properly to fight back.
Ambushed auxiliary troops had been routed
without engagement at the sight of her battle
mare. Assailed without respite, Scapula gathered
his legions as a hen gathers her chicks and
retreated step by bloodied step towards the
safety of the fortress at Camulodunum. He had
come to acknowledge the Boudica's existence, and
to fear her, but not enough to release Caradoc and send him back to those who mourned his loss.

The fire settled in on itself. Stinging smoke
billowed. The waterfall churned in the pool and
flowed on into the river. In the echoes of each
Breaca heard Caradoc's name, as she heard it daily
in the clash of weapons and the screams of dying
legionaries and the call of the crows on the battlefield.
With time, she did not doubt that it would
drive her mad.

Airmid sat opposite on a river rock with her
cloak pulled up round her hair. Beads of water
stood proud on it, like sweat. Her face was too
thin and too grey but she would have stood out
from the rest had it been any different. By night,
she tended the wounded and cleared a path to
the gods for the dead and dying. By day, while the
warriors slaughtered the legions in Caradoc's name,
she searched the dream for ways to bring him home.
Tonight, it seemed she might have found one.

To hope was dangerous. The fragile balance of
Breaca's mind depended on knowing that all hope
was lost, but it was impossible not to clutch at the
first thing offered. With her eyes on the fire, she
said, 'Tell me what you've seen.'

Airmid picked a damp log from the pile around
the fire and laid it on the flames. Water hissed and
became steam. Through its cloud, she said,
'Caradoc is in the emperor's hands; that is beyond
question. To reach Claudius, we must go through
Scapula. Nothing less will touch him; that, too, we
have known since the first days outside the
Brigante camp. Until now, we have not found a
means to come near the governor that was not
a blatant, and worthless, act of suicide. Tonight,
we believe he has made a mistake. Ardacos' shebears
have been shadowing his retreat and they
report that his engineers have built their marching
camp over the burial site of an ancestor-dreamer.'

'Whose grave is it?'

'I don't know. There is no standing stone, nor
raised mound, but her bones and her dream-marks
lie beneath the land at a crossing place of two
trackways used by the ancestors. I can feel them
and their anger. At any other time, it might not be
of use to us, but tonight the old moon becomes
new and Nemain's powers are at their height. I
believe that with the god's aid we can enter the
fort and reach Scapula.'

'To kill him.' Breaca said it flatly, not as  a
question.

Airmid exhaled, slowly, thinking. She rarely took time to think before she spoke in Breaca's
presence and only on matters that touched on her
relationship with her god. She said, 'Ultimately we
will kill him, yes, but he must not die by the sword. If you are set on coming, you must swear
to me that you will not cut his throat. He must die
slowly, over days, or the dream will be broken
and Caradoc will die at the emperor's decree in
Rome.'

Caradoc. Crucified. Cunomar, soft-haired, child
of the sea ...

Breaca dug her fingers into the rotting log and
waited for a wave of nausea to pass. A weak,
unwilling part of her grasped at the words and
held them. When she could speak, she said, 'But if
I don't kill him and the dream is not broken, is
there a chance that Caradoc and the children
might live?'

Airmid nodded. 'I believe there may be.
Nothing is ever clear and this is more fogbound
than most, but, yes, I, think that's what the gods
are showing me.'

It was the barest fragment of a straw in the
whirlpool of her drowning, and Breaca held on as
if it were dry land. She said, 'Then, for that alone,
I swear that I will not kill Scapula. But I will come
with you. No risk is so great that it's worth breaking
the dream to escape it.'

'You must become the elder grandmother, or as
close to her as you can.'

The fire was hotter, fed by dried yew and
hawthorn with the berries still on the branch. The
pool beneath the waterfall caught the flames
and reflected them back, brighter. Between fire and
water three dreamers, Airmid, Luain mac Calma
and Efnis of the Eceni, made a triangle and drew the
shape of the new-old moon at their feet. Breaca
stood in its centre, dry-mouthed as she rarely was
before battle. Beyond, Ardacos and four of his shebears
waited naked in the dark. They had washed
themselves clean of woad and smelled now only of
bear grease and white lime paint.

'The elder grandmother,' said Airmid a second
time. 'Our elder grandmother. The first and the
best. You have to call her to you and take on as
much of herself as she will give.'

'I don't remember her.' Childhood was a world
apart, lived by a stranger and reported only in
songs. The elder grandmother had died on the day
before Breaca returned from her long-nights and
became a woman. Then, her passing had seemed
the worst disaster the world could offer. 'I can't
even remember what colour her eyes were.'

'They were white when you knew her,' said
Airmid. 'She was blind and the central part was
wide with white at its core. The rim around it
seemed black. She will be different now. You have
to call her; you were her last dream. Do you still
have the stone spear-head that you used to kill the
eagle in your long-nights?'

'Yes.' From her belt-pouch Breaca emptied onto
her palm the cluttered treasure of her past:
Cunobelin's seal ring, given with his oath to
protect her; the serpent-spear brooch she had
made and whose twin she had given to Caradoc;
the hare's foot that had been Hail's first kill for
her; a lock of Cunomar's hair woven with a strand
of mane from the grey battle mare, made by her
son to mark the day when he rode his first war
horse. All of these were from her adult life. From
her childhood, she had kept only the flint spearhead
made by the ancestors that had been Ban's
gift for her long-nights.

She sifted the stone from the rest and held it out.
The pale, milky flint subdued the firelight as it had
always done. Smoke clung around it, making her
cough.

Airmid said, 'Look at the stone, Breaca. What
does it look like?'

It looked like a flint arrow-head, fashioned by
the ancestors. The chipped edges were as sharp
as the day it had been made. Against all probability,
fibres lingered on the narrowed haft where she had bound it to the grandmother's staff to use
as a spear against the war chief of the eagles.
Brown bloodstains marbling the flint became
redder, became fresh blood that spread out across
the blue-ridged stone. The elder grandmother said, Welcome home, warrior, and laughed.

Airmid said, 'Go to her, Breaca; find her for me,'
and somewhere, mac Calma and Efnis echoed, but
their voices came late and were distant whispers

from another time; the dream had already claimed her.

The elder grandmother was different, as Airmid
had said she would be. The old woman had been blind in the years when Breaca-the-child ' had
been her eyes and limbs, following in Airmid's
footsteps. The grandmother now had eyes bright
as a hawk's and as sharp. She stood upright, not
stooped, and there was no pain in her limbs to prevent her from walking unaided. Her hair was
silver-white and did not thin across the crown'as it
had. Only her face was the same, the skin
wrinkled as the hawthorn berries Airmid had laid
across the fire. Her eyes, astoundingly, were
brown; Breaca had always imagined them grey,
like her father's.

The grandmother laughed, a sound to crawl
under the skin of a child and make her search her
conscience for guilt. 'You should eat more,' she
said. 'And stop grieving. He is not dead yet, the
one for whom you kill but shed no tears.'

That was unfair. Breaca had tried to weep. For
nights, she had sat with the embers of dying fires,
waiting for the explosion of grief that must come,
as it had for Macha and her father. All she had
found was a cold, limitless anger that drove her, to
kill and to go on killing and the despair that
followed. Neither gave any sense of release.

'You grieve rightly for the dead,' said the grandmother.
'It is due them and honours their passing. There is no reason to grieve for the living.

I could not be sure he was living. It was not
true; to the ends of the earth Breaca believed she
would know when Caradoc died. Aloud she said,
'Is he whole and safe?'

'Who?'

'Caradoc. Who else?'

'Your son, perhaps, or the singer?' The grandmother capered, cackling. Her humour had
Always been terrifying. Death had not mellowed
it. 'Dubornos is well. He dreams of Airmid.' She
grinned and cocked her head to one side, bright
as a thrush. 'Caradoc has not yet been
harmed,' she said. 'He fears for you and for your
son.'

'Can we help him?'

'I don't know. Can you? Shall we ask the gods?'
Unusually limber, the grandmother crouched on
her haunches before the fire. Reaching into the
heat, she stirred it with her finger. When the logs
fell and resettled, she studied them, reading
futures in falling ash. Nodding and mumbling, she rose and walked past a stiffly silent Luain mac
Calma to wade into the river. The water was cold.
Breaca had washed in it earlier. Unhesitating, the
grandmother walked in until the sleek black water
lapped at the sag of her breasts. Leaning forward,
she breathed on the sleek mirror surface and
polished it with the heel of her hand the better to
admire her reflection.

'I don't know,' she said again, more slowly.
Raising her head, she looked directly at Breaca.
Her eyes shone with the light of fire on water.
'Would you rather have him dead and'safely in the
care of Briga, or alive, knowing that you would
never see him again?'

Breaca stared. The words swept through her
head and made no sense. She said, 'I don't
understand.'

The old woman nodded. The capering lunacy of
earlier was gone. She was serious as she had rarely
been in life and then only in the presence of death.
She said, 'The future is not set, it never is. It may
be that Caradoc dies but there is a chance he
may survive. If he dies, you will at least know
where he is. If he lives, you may not.'

'Is the choice mine?'

'It may not be. But you should know which you
prefer in case you are asked.'

It was a riddle. The dreamers set them to each
other in the dark of a winter's night on Mona but
the promise of life never hung on the answer,
nor the gift of death.

Which is worse: to live when life is unbearable,
or to die too soon while the heart-flame still
burns?

Which is better: to die and escape the threatened
pains of gods and men or to live to see the beauty
of another dawn?

Who has the right to make the choice for
another?

No-one.

The world opened at her feet and gave no
answers. With the words dry as bone in her
mouth, Breaca said, 'I can't choose. It's not my
place to decide for him.'

Encased up to her neck in freezing water, the
elder grandmother shook her head. 'Of course
not. The gods decide and those whose souls are held in balance, but still they - and you - must
know which you would choose. We cannot go on
else.'

The night waited. Three dreamers stood around
the fire who nightly crossed the boundaries
between the worlds. None of them offered help,
nor could she ask it.

A lifetime passed and another. She had never
thought herself indecisive. Beloved - what would
you ask of me?

She did not hear his voice; she had not heard it
since the day he took Sorcha's ferry and left Mona,
but the answer came none the less, with the
cadence of his speech and the certainty of his
memory. I ask only that which you would want of
me, knowing that I loved you. She said, 'I would
want what is best for Caradoc, whether he can be
with me or not. If he lives, I will get word of him
and he of me. There is no-one can deny us that.'

The grandmother waded from the water. She
smelled strongly of woad. 'A good choice,'
she said. 'The pain, then, will be yours as much as
his, possibly more so. But it may be that something
can be returned to you. Only the gods know that.'

'How do we make it happen?'

'Follow me. Do as I do and exactly as I say. Ask
no questions and trust those who walk with you,
however they seem. They are the men and women
you know them to be.'

The trackway lay bright in the heather, lit by a moon Breaca could not see. The flint arrowhead was hot, as if recently pulled from the fire. She
held it tightly so that the flaked edges bit into her
palm. The elder grandmother walked ahead,
her head high, her hair alive with the same lightas
lit the path. Breaca came behind and then Airmid.
Efnis and Luain mac Calma had remained at the fire to hold the dreaming and guide them home.

On either side, the men and women of the shebear
shuffled high-kneed through the heather.
They wore bearskins in a way Breaca had never
seen before: wrapped round so that man became bear and bear became man. Their eyes were small
and dangerous and their breath was fetid. Ardacos
had smiled at her and Breaca had believed his
teeth long and white. It was the gods' work,
clearly. The elder grandmother,had grabbed her
arm and pulled her away before she could ask him
how it had been done.

The she-bears had been forbidden to walk on
the trackway. As they came closer to the fort, they dropped onto all fours and ran on ahead towards the timbered stockade and ditch that surrounded Scapula's marching camp.

Each Roman night-camp was the same: built in
the evening and removed again the next day, leaving
only stake holes, a ditch and the latrines as
evidence of its presence. In their uniformity was
their strength. Each man knew his place and his duties; but the enemy too, after the first few
attacks, knew exactly the placement of gates and
defences. The she-bears ran for the southern ditch,
the one closest to the ancestor's track. The sentries
on the inside would have to be blind drunk and
stupid not to smell them as they came. Breaca
grasped the stone spear-head and regretted again
that she had not brought her sword.

'Get down.'

'What?'

The elder grandmother hissed her impatience.
'Get down, here, while they make the rampart
safe. Get down in the heather and crawl.'

Breaca felt the old woman's hand in the small of
her back, shoving her down until she lay on her
belly and squirmed forward like a snake. Heather
roots reared up on either side, tall as corn. They
scratched at her arms, drawing blood. The earth
smelled of old fox dirt and the mellow, almost sweet
musk of a snake. Something slid past her in the starlit
darkness, dry against the skin of her forearm. She
pressed her head into the dirt, breathing through a
wave of panic. Behind her she felt the elder grandmother
smirk.

A man died on the southern rampart of the fort,
and another. Breaca saw their souls walk ahead of
her on the track, lost and alone. She would have
called to them out of pity, but the elder grandmother
held her mouth. Her voice was a rustle of
heather. 'Quiet, child. Would you have them know
we are here?'

She would not. A legion and a full wing of
cavalry camped in that fort and she approached it
unarmed with a dead grandmother as her guide.
The images of what Scapula did to captured
dreamers came vividly to mind. Crucifixion would
be better. She moved more quietly and ignored the
mounting number of things that moved with her.

On her left, a she-bear grunted and she heard
Ardacos' reply. He had been her lover once; she
would have known his voice anywhere, even when
he was most fully a bear. Three more legionaries
died, not knowing their assailants. The night
became crowded with lost souls.

They crossed the rampart in a line, following
the bane-moon track. Ardacos had placed a log
across the ditch and pulled down the threepronged
stakes that guarded it. Within, bodies of
men in full armour lay scattered to either side,
their necks broken and their throats ripped in a
way that did not speak of edged weapons.
Through the rest of the camp, old fires burned
dimly before tents pitched in perfect rows and
columns; Rome slept, as it lived, in straight lines
that numbed the spirit.

The elder grandmother guided Breaca past
sleeping men. Airmid followed. The she-bears
were shadows on either side, ahead and behind.
Other things moved in the dark and it was better
not to ask what they were.

Quietly, the grandmother said, 'The governor's
tent is in the centre, on the main path. He has
pitched it over the grave of the serpent-dreamer.
She is angry and disturbs his sleep. Airmid will
disturb it more.'
Breaca stopped still on the track. 'How do you
know the ancestor is a serpent-dreamer?'

'I know everything.' The grandmother was
scathing. 'Why else do you think you're here?'

'That's it. In the centre, where the other trackway
meets ours.'

The second track passed from east to west,
darker than the surrounding night; amazing that
the legion's engineers had not seen it. The
governor's tent, placed directly over the crossing
point, was twice as large as those close by and
many times the size of those that sheltered the
sleeping legionaries. Six men guarded it, three
facing inward, three out. Two more patrolled the
margins. Unlike the sentries on the ditch, none of
these were half asleep. To get past them, all must die in the same breath. The she-bears hovered,
awaiting orders, but even god-driven they were
too few to achieve it without uproar.

The grandmother shook her head. To Ardacos,
she said, 'Not now. These are not for you. Keep
watch for others and stop them if they come.
Remember not to step on the trackways.'

Breaca asked, 'How do we reach Scapula?'

'Airmid knows,' said the grandmother.

'She does not.'

The words came from behind. Breaca turned.
Airmid stood away from the grandmother, her feet
lined carefully on the dark moon's track. Her eyes
were widely black, staring at the elder grandmother.
'You didn't tell me it was the
serpent-dreamer,' she said. 'I've met her before;
she guards the oldest of the ancestors' sacred
places on Mona. She is not safe.'

'Did you ask for safety when you called the
dreaming? I never heard it.' The grandmother
smiled blandly. 'Are you afraid, Airmid of
Nemain?'

There was a gap, which lengthened. The night
became crisp. Airmid said, 'Yes.'

Impossible. Airmid feared nothing and no-one.

The grandmother nodded. 'Good. It's time you
remembered the humility of that. Even so,
you must find a means to make this work or we
return whence we came with nothing achieved but
ten dead men.'

There were not yet ten men dead. Nobody said
so.

It seemed, for a moment, as if they might turn
back. Breaca said, 'Airmid, if it can be done no
other way, the she-bears and I will attack the
governor's tent. I have not come this far to turn
back.'

'You would die.'

'I know, but we might kill-,

'No, you would die before you ever reached the
tent and your soul would be held for ever by the
ancestor. This is not warrior's work.' Airmid
spoke to Breaca, sharply, but her eyes were on the
elder grandmother, engaged in another, deeper
dialogue.

Answering it aloud, the elder grandmother
said, 'Your warrior carries the serpent-woman's
spear-head and she fights under her mark. Is there
not something in that you could trust?'

Tonelessly, Airmid said, 'I didn't know it was
the mark of that ancestor.' She chewed on her
lower lip. Presently, she said, 'Breaca, with the
stone spear-head, do you carry also the brooch
in the shape of your serpent-spear, twin to the one
you gave Caradoc?'

'Yes.'

Once again, Breaca sifted through the contents
of her pouch. The brooch seemed small on her
palm. Years ago, she had carved the wood for the
mould and cast it herself in silver. Her father had
been alive then and had helped her. Two months'
work had gone into its making and she had thought
it the best she could ever create. The double-headed
serpent coiled back on itself, looking to the future
and the past. The war spear crossed and recrossed,
pointing to paths in other worlds. Two threads in
scarlet hung from the lower loop, first evidence of
Caradoc's love. The light of the old gods' moon
washed over it, turning scarlet to black, for death.

'He loved you then and does so still.' The elder
grandmother said it. She sounded oddly peaceful.
'Remember that now. Give it to Airmid with your
spear-head and hold on to the memory of times
when the serpent was not looped in black.'

'I don't think I can.' There had been so much
war. It was almost impossible to remember a time
when the red thread had been new and the love it
signalled fresh and unexplored.

'Think.' The elder grandmother stood behind
with her hands on Breaca's shoulders. 'Think of
the sea, and a boy washed up in a storm. Think
of a river, and another, and another, and another.'

Breaca had not thought before that the
moments of greatest joy with Caradoc, at least in
the early days, had come beside water. Reminded,
it was easier. She was a girl again, and dreamed a
storm that broke a ship on a headland. In the
flotsam lay a corn-haired youth, not quite
drowned. His waking smile slipped into her soul.

Storm water had washed them together. In the
river of the Eceni, winter meltwater nearly killed
them again. Caradoc's face rose above it, laughing.
We can't rescue each other ... not the point. He
submerged again, and came up in the spring, dry
and dressed for travel. A cap hid the brightness of
his hair and his cloak was dullest brown. She gave
him a serpent-spear brooch cast in silver, the mark
of her dreaming. No red thread bound it yet; she
had not dared acknowledge the feeling. Still,
Caradoc had known it for what it was, and had
taken it, staring into the river water. Ban had been
alive then, and had understood.

In late summer, with Ban long dead, the red
threads hung limp as Caradoc's voice said, I still
have the brooch. Whatever happens, it still means
what it did.

Soon after, his daughter, Cygfa, was born to
another woman and Breaca hated him for it,
because hate was safer than love. Autumn brought
them close in battle, with love and hate put aside
to defend a greater need. In the middle part, with
death on all sides, the red threads bound them and
they made a child. The river had sung over the
sound of their loving.

'We thought we could win, then,' said Breaca.
The elder grandmother said, 'You can still win,
Nothing is fixed. The gods do not create their
people only to destroy them.'

'What must we do?'

'If you can destroy Scapula, that will be a good
start.'

Somewhere close, Airmid said, 'Breaca? Can
you walk with me? We need to go round behind
the governor's pavilion. Here ... take back the
brooch. Use it to hold on to the memories. They
are our gift to the ancestor-dreamer. If you can
keep them strong, we'll be safe. Come now. I'll
guide your steps.'

She held the memories, her gift. Caradoc was
with her, a summer Caradoc, soon after Graine's
birth. They walked together, parents and child, in
the circle of stones set by the ancestors.
Hail ran ahead, hunting. In the Roman camp,
Airmid guided her a long way round, past sleeping
men, to the rear of the governor's tent. Patrolling
sentries passed them, not looking into shadows.
The serpent-spear brooch was matt and dull.
Only the red thread glowed with its own life, heart
bound to heart, bloody in the dark.

They stopped at the back of the pavilion.
Airmid counted aloud, softly. Breaca said, 'What?'

The single word slurred.

Airmid said, 'The guards walk at the same pace
and stop together in front of the tent. They will be
away for three hundred heartbeats. If I can go in
and come out in that time, we are safe.'

The magnitude of the risk came to Breaca. 'I
should do this,' she said.

'No. You swore to me you would not. Just hold
the brooch and hold to the memories of life, not of
death. It will be harder than you imagine.'

The sentries passed again. The skin of the tent
hung loosely pale. Airmid said, 'Now,' and
stepped up to it. The guards heard nothing and did
not turn.

It will be harder than you imagine.

The flint spear-head cut the side of the tent as
cleanly as any knife, slitting down from knee
height to the turf below. The she-bears entered
legionary tents in this way, reaching in to cut
the throats of the sleeping occupants. Dead men
filled Breaca's mind. White flesh and the froth of a
last breath choked her. With an effort, she recalled
Ardacos' bear-dance on Mona, in the days when
she had believed that he or Gwyddhien would be
Warrior. Caradoc had been there. She fought to
bring the shape of his face to mind, to lay it over
the many kills of the she-bears. When that failed,
she remembered Graine, who was alive and
free, and then created Caradoc around the child,
holding her. His smile came last. She tried to
rebuild the fire in his eyes, as he smiled at her.

Grey. They are grey, the colour of clouds after
rain, and the left one droops slightly, from a
sword-cut to the brow, where an auxiliary struck
down, back-handed, before Gwyddhien killed him. The man had pale red hair and when he died,
he ... Grey. Caradoc's eyes are grey, the colour of
clouds ...

'Are you sure they were not black? They would
be better black, for vengeance.' The voice was
older than the elder grandmother's could ever be.
It offered an opening and a path forward without
resistance. 'Black,' said the ancestor. 'Vengeance is
black. Is that not what you want?'

'Love is red.' That voice was Airmid's, faint.
'The threads on the serpent-brooch were red, for
love.'

The ancestor laughed softly. The sound was a
snake, smoothing through grass. 'But your
warrior has not killed this past month for love.
Each man slain has gone to the otherworld with
her hate carved on his soul. Even those who
wander godless and lost tonight know the name of
the one for whom they died. The warrior knows
that, if you don't.'

The ancestor's voice carried more power than
the others. She alone knew the reality by which
Breaca lived.

'Vengeance.' The word was a gift. 'If you want
me to kill for you, should the governor, too, not go
slowly to his death knowing for whom he dies and
why?' An image of Scapula came clear in the dark,
racked by endless pain. 'Is this not what you
crave?' 

'Yes.'

'Would this not let you rest if it came to pass?'

No. The elder grandmother answered before
Breaca could, or it may have been Airmid; or
perhaps the two were one. We want Caradoc
alive, and the children, only that. We do not live
for vengence.

It was not true. It could not be made to be true.
For two months, Breaca had lived only for
revenge. It was not possible so suddenly to let it
go. She felt the suck of the ancestor and the
loosening hold of the elder grandmother.

'Black,' said the ancestor. She spoke past Breaca
to the elder grandmother, as an adult speaks to a
child. 'Black is not for vengeance alone, but for all
death. It is not wrong to crave the death of
another, only to deny what you need. You should
know that. Let the warrior give me the black and
I will do what she and you both want.'

'Breaca, no.' Airmid spoke clearly. 'The one
called must live free of the taint of vengeance; or it
will destroy him. Think of Caradoc as you would
have him live. A lifetime's love should not be overshadowed
by a month of hate.'

She tried. In the darkness she did her best to
build Caradoc, layer by layer, striving to make him
brighter, more alluring than the promise of
Scapula's dying. A lifetime's love should not be
overshadowed by anything, but she had hated
Rome for as long as she had loved Caradoc. Love
and hate combined were the foundation on which
she fought and lived and breathed and she did not
have the power to pull them apart.

Think only of Caradoc, whispered the elder
grandmother and, aching, Breaca said, 'I can't.'

The darkness drew her in. Hate was easier than
love, and hurt less, and she could have it, here,
now, without the terrors and impossibility of
hope. The ancestor beckoned and Breaca, only
partly unwilling, followed into a place that was
for ever black.

'Ban's eyes were black. You loved him once.
Think of him.'

The new voice was Macha's, mother to Ban.
Always, she had the power to command. Now, she
offered a lifeline and did not allow it to be refused.
Breaca reached for it, striving to remember. Ban's eyes were black, resonant, like the hide of a
black horse, or a lake in the night, or a crow's
wing at the shoulder, where the colour is most
dense. They were charcoal and jet and he did not
live for revenge but- 'Ban's dead,' she said aloud.
'Why would the ancestor want him?'

'He is who he is. He is the red and the black
together. Trust me. Remember all of him. Call
him.' The ancestor spoke with Macha and the two
together were unassailable; no-one living could
withstand them.

Breaca was not a dreamer; she had no training
in the calling back of those who had gone to be
with Briga. Knowing nothing else, she drew
together the many memories of her brother and
breathed them to life.

A small boy sat opposite her in the women's
place, grieving over a near-dead hound puppy. His
hair was the same colour as his eyes and both
reflected the fire of women's dreaming. 'His name
is Hail,' he said. 'I can heal him. Let me try.'

In a whelping hut in Cunobelin's dun, an older
Ban, and wiser, sat opposite Amminios and
challenged him to a game of Warrior's Dance with
the slave-boy Iccius as the winner's prize. He had
fought the game as he later fought the battle, with
the fire of absolute purpose and an intelligence
that outplayed a man whose life had been spent in
games and hard-fought wagers. Her pride had
matched her love for him, both of them
overwhelming.

Ban's eyes were black, like the night, and
shining. Caradoc had stood beside her. It was
easier to remember him now. Somewhere, the
pressure had lifted. Caradoc's eyes are grey, the
colour of clouds after rain.

'Thank you.' It was impossible to tell who had
spoken.

'Breaca? Breaca, will you come back with me?
The sentries are returning; we must be gone.'

She did not remember running, although her
heaving chest told her that she must have done so.
On the far side of the rampart, loping back along
the trackway, she said, 'You didn't tell me I was
calling him back.'

Airmid was behind. She said, 'I told you as
much as was safe. If you had known, would it
have made it any easier to fight the ancestor?'

'I would not send you into battle unarmed.'

'You were not unarmed, and you were not
unsupported. You did what you had to do as well
as you could do it. It was enough. We're both
alive.'

'Did it work? Did you kill Scapula?'

'No, but the serpent-dreamer infests his dreams
and will continue to haunt him when he wakes. I
do not believe a man can survive long under such
assault. He will sicken and die, or he will kill himself.
He will be dead by the next old moon.'

They were alone. The she-bears had left them at
the start of the trackway. The elder grandmother
had not followed them from the governor's tent.
Her absence left a gap that let the wind through.
Airmid said, 'I had to leave your brooch on
Scapula to bind the dreamer. I'm sorry.'

'I can make another. Only Ban will not be there
to spit on the casting for luck.'

'But he may have found peace and that will
be luck enough. Macha was there and she can be
trusted to know what is needful. We never found
Ban's soul after Amminios took his body. It may
be that the serpent-dreamer has access to places
we do not and can bring him back into Briga's
care. We can pray so.'

'To whom do we pray?'

'To Nemain. The other gods will hear it.'

There was no moon; there never had been, but the
trackway had lit the route to the fort. Returning,
the gods withdrew their light and the night
deepened to black. Breaca led by feel, slowly,
pushing across the moorland where the heather
and bracken were least. Night beasts shadowed
them, fewer than there had been, but more than
other nights; a vixen barked and cubs answered
from either side; an owl screamed, the high note
that cuts through sleep; far back, near the fort, a
bear yammered over a kill.

Breaca stopped. 'That's Ardacos.'

Airmid said, 'Don't turn back,' and pushed hard
on her shoulder.

Together, they walked through the night,
blindly.

They reached a small cliff with no way round
but to climb down. Lowering herself from an
uncertain ledge, Breaca realized she could see her
hands in front of her face. On the solid ground
beneath, she could see her feet. 'Dawn's coming,'
she said.

'I know.' Airmid climbed nimbly. 'We have to be 
at the fire before the first edge of the sun rises over
the horizon. Can you walk faster?'

They walked faster, and when they could
properly see their feet and the paths winding,
through the knotted heather, they ran. Mist rose to
greet the morning, great blankets drifting over the
moor. On the eastern horizon, the morning star
rose and sparked fuzzily. Far ahead, the light of a
dying fire burned red against the paling light. TWO
figures sat hunched beside it, wrapped against a
night's cold. One of them waved urgently.

'Faster,' said Airmid.

They ran, careless of the footing, and crossed
the river on slippery stones. Luain mac Calma sat
on the rotting log before the fire. He did not rise
to greet them, but lifted his head as they crashed
across the rocks. A decade's ageing creased his
face and cleared slowly as he looked at them and
beyond to the growing light of the dawn. Blinking, he rubbed his face.

'You're back,' he said.

He was among the most eloquent of dreamers;
when he chose, he could fill a night with rhetoric
and have words to spare, He stretched his legs and
laid one last branch on the fire. Autumn leaves
crisped in the heat but did not burn. Leaning in, he
blew until a nascent flame snaked up to catch the
lowest leaf.

When it had burned fully to ash, he said, 'It
would seem there are good reasons why that has
never been done. I would suggest we do not
attempt it again.'

'Did you think us lost to the serpent-dreamer?'
asked Airmid.

'You were lost, that was beyond doubt. The
question was what parts of you she would give
back again.' He looked at them, squinting. 'Not
everything, it seems.'

Efnis roused more slowly and walked to the
river to wash his arms and face. By the fire again,
he spat on his palms and rubbed them together,
then reached out and touched Breaca's brow. His
hand was hot as molten iron. Breaca flinched.
Luain mac Calma grasped her shoulders. 'Don't
move.'

It was hard not to move. Efnis' heat scorched
her skin. Voices seeped through his fingers. Light
flared and was still and it was not of the rising
sun. The elder grandmother laughed and an older
voice joined hers that rang like flint on iron.

Two speaking as one said, 'Your time is ours,
warrior. When we have need of you, we will call.'

Something stung above Breaca's eye and made
her blink. Luain mac Calma stood before her. His
knife was of bronze and sharp on both edges.
With its tip he had cut where Efnis' hand had
been. A bead of blood wept into her left eye and
stung a second time. With her own hand, Breaca
wiped it away. The day brightened and the mist
cleared as if it had never been. The leaking voices
died.

From the fire, with her back to the flaring sun,
Airmid said, 'Welcome back. If the gods are with
us, we will bring Caradoc home as safely.'

XVIII.

By order of the emperor, Tiberius Claudius Drusus
Nero Germanicus Britannicus, conveyed through
his freedman Narcissus, two ocean-going grain
cargo vessel sailed from the mouth of the largest
eastern river in the north of the province of
Britannia. His Imperial Majesty was fully aware
of the extreme risk of an ocean crossing, having
experienced the wrath of the autumn storms in his
single sea voyage during the conquest of Britannia.
To minimize this risk, the two ships sailed three
days apart, at times considered auspicious by both
augurs and seamen. They took the long sea route
round the south coast of the island and down
the western side of Gaul to pass east again
between the Iberian peninsula and the northern
coast of Mauretania on a course straight for
Italy. They docked at night and in secrecy at the
Roman port of Ostia, recently reengineered
and made safe by the actions of the same emperor.

Each ship was met at the docks by a halfcentury
of the first cohort, the Batavian
horse-guards, hand-picked for their unswerving
loyalty to their emperor and, importantly, their
well-tested ability to keep their counsel while
blind drunk. The escort brought a covered grain
cart in which the human cargo was transported
the eighteen miles to Rome and thence, under
cover of darkness, to a secure annexe of the
servants' quarters at the imperial palace on
the Palatine hill. They were met by the former
slave Narcissus and two other freedmen: Callistus,
who -had charge of the public treasury, and
Polybius, religious secretary and favourite of the
Empress Agrippina. On the second occasion,
medical help was sought. After due consideration
and on Narcissus' express command, the
emperor's physician Xenophon of Cos was woken
and required to attend certain of the emperor's
newly arrived prisoners. His subsequent advice
was followed to the letter. In the imperial palace,
neither the freedmen's nor the doctor's word was
law, but both assumed a close approximation.

Dubornos surfaced slowly from dense, unpleasant
dreams in which he strove to reach the gods and
could not find them. The space they had occupied
in his soul was empty, like a house not lately used,
and he was alone outside it, calling. He lay still on
a pallet of hard wood and brought his mind back
to the world around him. For a while, he
wondered that the sea had become so still and the
taunting gulls so silent. His mind still rocked in
nauseating rhythm but his body failed to follow,
His body, instead, noticed other things in the stillness:
he was in pain, but less than he had been; he
was no longer naked and his wrists, ankles and
neck were unshackled; the air no longer stank of
raw and rotting sewage but of dust and damp
plaster and an ointment made from olive oil.
Flexing his fingers, he found the pressure on his
forearms came from bandages, not iron, and he
remembered the hands of the doctor who had
applied both ointment and linen. The man
had been skilled, had worked with intelligent
compassion on the ulcerating sores on ankles,
wrists and collar bones where the shackles had
chafed. Afterwards, there had been hot food,
which had been welcome, and wine, which was
less so.

In an earlier, easier, part of his life, Dubornos
had pledged never to drink wine but then he had
pledged also to give his life defending the children
of the Boudica from death or captivity and had
failed comprehensively to do so; drinking the gift
of the enemy had seemed a small oath-breaking
after that. The wine had contained other things
besides grape. He remembered the bitter-spice
taint of poppy on the back of his tongue and then
the dreams. Swimmingly, they claimed him again.
The lamps had been relit next time he woke;
their steady light made it easier to grasp
consciousness and hold it. The dullness had been a
blessing; for a fleeting, beautiful moment, he was
alert and free and could remember who he was, if
not where and why. Then the accumulated
memories of the past fifteen days returned all at
once with terrifying clarity. He lay still, watching
the unforgiving black behind his closed lids and
tried to breathe evenly through waves of nauseating
fear. A groan rose unbidden from deep in his
chest and he stifled it against clenched teeth,
grimacing afterwards in the gloom, a half-grin of
self-congratulation as if so small an act of defiance
were a victory in itself.

He breathed deeply, striving for calm. He was
Dubornos mac Sinochos, warrior of the Eceni and
of Mona; he would not display fear in the presence
of the enemy. More than that, he was a singer of
the first degree; death was his ally. In his training
he had passed the singers' final test, had lain in an
oak casket while Maroc, Airmid and Luain mac
Calma packed him about with earth and lowered
him into the pit he himself had dug. For three
days and nights he had lain still, buried alive in
a simulation of death so complete that the
boundaries between this world and the other had
blurred to nothing. When, at moonrise on the
evening of the third day, they had exhumed him,
he had not wanted to come back. Briga by then
was his friend, the death she offered his closest
companion. In the eternity of darkness, he had
walked again and again along the uncounted
paths taken by the souls of the dead in their
journey between this world and the other and had
found in the walking a peace he had never
encountered in life.

Airmid had worked alone with him for two
days to bring him fully back. The closeness to her
and the pain it brought were, he thought, part of
the reason he had not wanted to return. He had
wanted Luain mac Calma or Maroc or Efnis to
take her place but none had done so and he had
resented all of them for it. Later, in the small
moments of profound joy that gave colour to his
life, he had begun to understand the depth of love
she had given him in those two nights and to feel
grateful.

In the early part she had made him sit up and
talk, endlessly, of their shared childhood. He had
fought that; Briga was less heartless. He had been
shocked to find Airmid's will stronger than his and
the god's combined. She had wound him in a
thread of remembrance and sage smoke and
refused to let him go. Later, they had walked alone
together in the low hills of Mona and she had
made him eat whatever they found that was
yellow, the colour of sun and day and life. It was
high summer and the wind-coarsened turf had
been alive with yellows. He had tasted flowers and
fungi he was sure were poisonous and yet he had
not died. Later still, she had made him bathe in a
small, craggy pool at the foot of a waterfall and
had joined him in the chill water, holding his
naked body to hers, and his heart had broken and
a dam inside him with it so that he wept tears that
matched the flow of the river until there were no
more tears to come. Afterwards, he had slept
chaste at her side, fulfilling in part the dream of a
lifetime.

He had woken with his head on her knees, both
of them dressed. Her fingers teased out the tangles in his hair. Her voice had the deep, reverberating
tones of the god.

'It is not death that you fear, son of Sinochos,
whatever your body may have told you in the
terror of your first battle - it is life. To be a true
singer, you must bridge the river and stand evenly
on both sides; one foot must be in life to balance
the one that stands in death. It is as sacred to sing
the newly born into this world as the newly dead
into the other. Both must be done with equal
heart. Can you do that?'

She was beautiful, he had always thought so,
even when they were scrape-kneed children and
she with the green frog tattooed on her arm that
marked her as mad. In the evening light, she was
Nemain, come alive and smiling. He had not
believed what she said; he lived daily with the
shame that fear of death had brought on him but
he had smiled back and said, 'I can try.'

He had done his best in the four years since, but
had not always succeeded. On the mountainside
above the valley of the Lame Hind, he told himself
he had chosen life only because he had believed it
would help Caradoc to win final victory if he
knew his children were alive. Selfishly, he had also
yearned to see the reaction of the cavalry decurion
when Caradoc rode at the head of Venutios' three
thousand warriors to crush the tattered remains of
Scapula's legions. In the vast, cluttered camp
of the Brigantes, faced first with Cartimandua,
who had threatened a life that was far worse than
death, and then with Caradoc, shackled and
bloody, Dubornos had felt his detachment and the
strength it gave him begin to waver. In the long
spaces of tedium between one humiliation and the
next, the singer had begun to recognize the truth
in Airmid's words, that death had never been his
fear, but that what unmanned him, what left him
weak-limbed and sobbing with terror, was the
prospect of the last long-drawn moments of life
that led up to it.

He was not alone. A warrior can maintain an
outward impression of composure, even of
humour, in the face of danger but no-one yet living
can control his bowels. In the Brigantes' camp,
there had been some pretence at privacy and, in
theory at least, a man could keep the rancid
fluctuations of each morning's movements to himself.
On the ship, such dignity had been lost. They had been separated from Caradoc; he had been
transported on an earlier ship and, for all they
knew, he could have been already dead. Without
him, Dubornos and Cwmfen, Cygfa and Cunomar
had lived for uncounted days in the lightless, ratridden
bilges of a merchant ship, sleeping on fetid
planking, feeding and drinking at the whim of the
auxiliaries who were their guards and feeling their
way to the slop buckets afterwards.

There had been no need to speak of it but the
two adults, if not the children, had known from
the beginning that the aching, mind-numbing
terror was not theirs alone and taken some
strength from the knowledge. On the first night, as
the ship fell quiet, Dubornos had slept with an ear
to the wooden hull listening to Manannan of the
oceans whisper and rush less than an arm's length
away and had prayed to the god in the silence of
his heart that the gift of oblivion might claim them
all.

They had nearly lost Cunomar, although not to
the sea god. The boy had begun to vomit as they
passed down the Gaulish coast but it was only when
he had begun to pass bloody, fluid faeces that they
realized he was afflicted by more than seasickness.
The ship's doctor was an army man, bluntly efficient
but with a limited supply of medications. Nevertheless,
he had done his best. His orders had been
unambiguous: he was to deliver his prisoners alive to
the emperor's justice. The cost to his own person if
he failed was unthinkable.

With this in mind, he had provided the
powdered elm bark and poppy to stop the vomiting
and diarrhoea and had brought them fresh
water with his own hands. At Dubornos'
suggestion, he had ordered their slop buckets
emptied twice daily and had them moved up to
one of the mid-level decks to a holding room with
a hatch that could be opened for air and light.

Light and air: gifts beyond imagining that had
once been taken for granted. For the first time in
days, they had smelled the salt sea in all its
dizzying purity. The sharpness had made them
sneeze and sneezing rewoke the shackle-sores on
their necks. They wept in silence, hiding their tears
from each other, as if such things still mattered.
The light, then, was a mixed blessing. The darkness
had hidden the suppurating ulcers beneath
the irons, the skeletal thinness of the children - so
much weight lost in so little time - the depth of
care etched on the faces of the adults. Presently,
they took turns lying with their heads beneath the
hatch, staring up at the changing sky because anything
was better than looking at what they had
become. In the evening, when it could be hidden
no longer, Dubornos had learned what Cygfa and
Cwmfen had been keeping from him, that the girl
had begun her bleeding as they rounded the southwesterly
point of the Iberian peninsula and was in
transition to becoming a woman.

The news had been devastating. When he
thought he could sink no lower, the gods proved
him wrong. From the moment of their capture,
Cygfa had followed the lead of her parents in displaying
an unimpeachable dignity. Only twice had
it faltered when, first in the Brigante camp and
then again on the boat, a clerk of the legions
had asked her outright if she was a virgin. In
their presence, she had said nothing, staring
over their heads with a frozen disdain that left
them silent. Neither had pressed the question and
the girl's reaction afterwards, the pallor and
shaking, had gone unseen by the enemy.

The fact of her coming to adulthood was
similarly concealed, but its impact was as damaging
to her soul as the flux was to her brother's
body. Dubornos had offered to do what he could.
As a singer, it was in his power to begin the opening
rites of the long-nights, the passage from
childhood to adulthood, and he was prepared,
in the absence of any other, to do his best to
achieve the full ceremony. It would not be as it
should be, but he had believed that, with
Cwmfen's help, he could have brought about a
true dreaming and the girl could have gone to sleep as a child and awoken a woman with at least
some ghosted whisper from the gods. Cygfa had
refused with the same cool restraint with which
she had spoken to the legions' clerks and
Dubornos had not pressed his offer twice. Instead
he had watched her retreat into herself, building a shell against the outer world. It had seemed
effective and he had admired her fortitude. He did
so still, although the unbending fragility of it
frightened him more than if she had wept.

The ultimate test had come much later in a
poorly lit sanatorium in the emperor's palace
when Polybius, the religious secretary, had asked
Cygfa for a third time if she retained her maidenhood.
This man was not a clerk of the legions, but
one of the half-dozen most powerful men in
Rome. His orders could be rescinded only by the
emperor, who was in bed. When his question
had been met by the same silence, Polybius had
snapped his fingers and ordered the doctor to
examine her.

Clearly unwilling, Xenophon, the Greek
physician, had done so on a pallet in the presence
of armed guards and her mother. Cygfa had not
fought him and nor had she wept, even when the
physician had pronounced her intact in front of
the assembled guards, clerks and freedmen, but
Dubornos, turning back from his fixed study of
the depiction of Io on the opposite wall, believed
he had seen a small part of the fire in her snuffed
out, and feared he would never see it lit again. It
was soon after that the wine had been offered and
he had drunk it, craving forgetfulness.

A singer lives by sound first and all other senses
second. Thus even while the memory of Cygfa's
blue-white face knotted his bowels, Dubornos was
listening, sorting the murmurs of the coming
morning from those around him. Without opening
his eyes, he established that he was in a small,
cramped room that was neither the sanatorium in
which Cunomar had been treated and Cygfa dishonoured
by the doctor, nor the underground
holding cell to which they had first been brought.
The former had been near the main part of the
palace and the floors had been smoothly marbled,
so that sound reflected from them like light. The
latter had been tight and airless and the single
lamp had guttered noisily and had clearly done so
for years, so that the walls were grey with soot
and the air smelled of rancid sheep's fat.

In this new place, the bricks of the wall were so
close that the wash of his breath came back to lift
his own hair. The muted crackle of burning charcoal
to his left and right spoke of at least two braziers alight in the corners. The lamps above were filled with finer oil, and had recently been lit
with flint and tinder; the sharp smell of it lingered.

The only door was behind him and to the right.
Two guards stood there. The one on the left
suffered from impacted sinuses and breathed with
a whistle while the other maintained the drifting
inhalations of near-sleep. They were horse-guards,
the vast Germanic tribesmen who wore their hair
tied in a warrior's knot over the left ear. Their
reputation had spread to Mona as the men who
had carried Claudius to power and ensured that he
kept it. The Romans considered them dullwitted
but feared them as barely controllable savages. Having watched them through part of the
previous evening, Dubornos believed both assessments
to be reasonable and accurate.

He was about to turn over when he heard the
slow, still breath of a man sitting awake and alert
on the opposite side of the room. Two in-breaths
later, he knew who it was.

'Caradoc?'

'I'm here.'

'Gods ...' Relief washed him, as the fear had
done earlier. 'I thought they would hold us apart.
Have you seen-' The guards shifted warily.
Dubornos bit off the words. Without turning his
head, he said, more slowly and still in Eceni, 'The
larger of the two guards fornicates with pigs.
The smaller is his child by a lop-eared sow.'

In the hush that followed, the Batavians
straightened themselves and became more
attentive but did not offer violence.

Caradoc laughed softly. In the same tongue, he
said, 'Nicely done. They speak Latin and Batavian
and, I think, a little Greek, but not Eceni unless
they can act better than any paid performer
and they don't have the wit, for that. In any case,
even if they understood what you said, they have
orders not to kill us. If we die, the fate that would
have been ours will be theirs. I think it is safe to
assume even the horse-guards fear that.'

Dubornos opened his eyes. The cell was smaller
than he had thought; his pallet took up half the
width and two-thirds of the length. The door was
oak with iron binding the planks. The walls were
poorly plastered, showing the underlying pattern
of the bricks beneath; the sanatorium had been
done better, the underground holding cell not at
all. The ceiling was flat and, unnervingly, it
seemed likely that it was not surmounted by a
roof, but by yet another storey of the building.
Only aboard the ship had Dubornos experienced
life with others walking above his head. He had
not found it comfortable then, either.

Three guttering lamps hung from brackets on
the wall. In the curling shadows beneath the
central one, dressed in a tunic of un-dyed wool,
Caradoc sat up on an identical pallet with his back
to the plaster, his knees hugged to his chin and his
arms wrapped loosely round them.

Bandages of unbleached linen cuffed his wrists,
the right one crusted a little with dried blood. The
contusions on his face from when they took him
prisoner were fading and his hair shone cleanly
gold as it had not done since the battle at the Lame
Hind, lacking only a single lock, shorn short to the
scalp on the right side where Cartimandua had cut
away the warrior's braid to keep 'as a remembrance'.
Sometime since his capture, they had
returned to him the brooch in the shape of the
serpent-spear that was the only item of jewellery
that he ever wore. It needed polishing, but it was
clean of blood and the pin whole. Two threads of
red-dyed wool hung from the bottom loop, their
ends a little frayed. One of them had become
stained during the journey and was stiffly black.
Like Dubornos, he was unshackled, and the
lack of the irons, or perhaps three days' rest, had
set him right again, lifting the haggard weariness
of the Brigante camp so that he looked once more
the warrior who could lead a nation. Under
Dubornos' scrutiny, the cool, grey gaze remained
level, with a dry spark of irony at its core. If they
had not shared a slop bucket for ten days in the
sea port before the first ship departed, Dubornos
could have believed him unafraid.

'You didn't drink the poppy,' Dubornos said.
They had each taken the same oath against drinking
wine; only Dubornos had broken it. Shame was a small thing, a distraction from terror; he
welcomed its familiarity.

Caradoc shrugged. 'I wasn't offered any.
Tonight, if they offer us both, you can keep
watch and I'll drink the wine and then sleep.'

'Will they do so?' Will there be a tonight and 
will we be in a position to choose to drink or not
drink, to sleep or not sleep?

'I don't know. Narcissus, the freed slave, seems
to be in charge. If word on Mona is right, the man
is shrewd and intelligent and has no great lust for
blood.'

'But he answers to an emperor who is neither of 
those things and who enjoys the spectacle of slo
death more even than Caligula whom he replaced.'

Caradoc blinked slowly, exhaling through
pursed lips. 'Thank you, yes. In which case, we
should be grateful that Claudius is said to be weak
and ruled by his wives and freedmen. If he had
Caligula's instincts and the same lack of restraint,
the dying would already have begun. That one
once made a father sit and drink wine while his
son's skin was flayed from his body before him. I
don't recall what happened to the father.' The grey
eyes flickered. 'Is that what you wanted to hear?"

Dubornos' skin prickled beneath his tunic, as if
the nerves were already exposed. He said, 'Sooner
started is sooner ended,' and knew as the words
left his mouth that he was not alone in thinking it
and that it should not have been spoken aloud.

'They have the children,' said Caradoc flatly.

'Xenophon the physician has been tending them.
He came here this morning to make sure that you
were still asleep. He believes that Cygfa and
Cunomar may be allowed to live, if only in
slavery. If there is anything - anything at all - that
we can do to keep them alive, we must do it. It's
all there is left.' He looked up sharply. 'And don't say what you were about to say. Xenophon knows
it, but has told no-one else as yet.'

Cygfa is no longer a child.

Dubornos sucked in air and made himself unsay
the words that had so nearly rolled off his tongue. They hung in the clotted air, a sentence of death
unspoken.

Caradoc's smile was a brief baring of teeth. 'Thank you. If this is over in less than a month, it may be they will never find out. Meanwhile, you
could tell me your entire stock of heroes' tales, or
we could find some other way to pass the time.'
He eased himself down on the pallet until he lay
on one elbow, Roman style. 'I don't suppose you
still have your knucklebones with you?'

Dubornos' knucklebones had been taken from him soon after his capture and he had not made
any more, but they fashioned gaming pieces from
fragments of plaster with crosses or lines scored
on them with a fingernail and played with them a
primitive version of Warrior's Dance. Through the
passing afternoon, with the autumn sun baking
the southern wall of the cell so that the place
became a roasting oven and sweat ran freely from
guards and prisoners alike, they played a game
that neither had taken the time to practise since
before the invasion. From that, they relaxed
slowly into talk and the sharing of such news as they had garnered since their capture.

Moving a piece idly forward, Caradoc said, 'Do
you remember Corvus? The Roman who was
shipwrecked at the same time the Greylag went
down?'

Dubornos looked up. 'How could I not? He
beat me in the river race, knocked me into the
water and then helped pull me out before I fell into
the gods' pool. He was the hero and I the fool. I
hated him for it.'

'And now he is prefect of a Gaulish cavalry
wing and we could both hate him if we chose.'

'Do we choose?'

'I think not. He had integrity then and he has it
still. He was here on other business but he found I
was here and came last night to see that I was
being treated well. He left our land only four days
ago and sailed direct to Ostia.'

'So he has recent news.' Dubornos tried not to
make it sound like a question. From the moment
of his capture, the thing he had wanted most was
word of Mona and those he loved.

For Caradoc it could have been no different. He
nodded, a little tightly. 'He does indeed. If he's
telling the truth, the western tribes are buzzing like
bees round a kicked skep. They wiped out two
troops of cavalry in as many days leaving only one
survivor, and he lived only because he convincingly
feigned death. If he is right, the attacks were
led by Breaca, which means she--' He stopped abruptly.
Breaca.

The name rattled in the stifling dark, a reminder
of all that was, lost. It was the first time any of
them had spoken her name in Dubornos' hearing
since their capture. Even now, he thought the word had leaked out accidentally, sprung under
pressure from a mind that knew no rest.

Very quietly, Caradoc said, 'Which means she
knows what has happened and is, predictably,
angry about it.'

He strove for irony, or a measure of humour,
and failed. The saying of the name had broken
something in both of them. Without either asking
the other, they abandoned the game. Dubornos
gathered the pieces and slid them under his pallet,
for later, perhaps. Caradoc pushed himself back
until his shoulders were against the wall. He covered
his eyes with one hand, hiding them and
whatever anguish they might betray. The fingers of
the other ran over and  over the serpent-spear
brooch pinned to the front of his tunic.

The central lamp above his head had run out of
oil and not been relit. The poor light carved
hollows beneath his cheeks, made plainer the
tensions in his face, which had not gone, but been
hidden by an effort of will, or by a deliberate act
of leadership, even in this place where there was
only one other man to lead. He looked now as
Dubornos felt, a soul adrift in a limitless space,
shouting aloud for his gods and hearing not even
the echo of his own voice. His breathing, which
had been deliberately slow, became progressively
more ragged.

Dubornos waited, holding his breath. He was
reaching for air when Caradoc's fist smacked on
the wall, lifting a scallop of badly laid plaster. His
voice cracked with hard-contained passion. 'I wish
to all the gods I knew how she was.'

It was the first move either prisoner had made
that could be considered violent. The guards,
clearly, had been awaiting some such. Grinning,
they moved their hands to their weapons. They
could not kill, but were permitted a measure of
entertainment. Menace, that had been distant,
came closer. The smaller guard clutched a fodder
of lead. Through the whole afternoon he had
toyed with it, folding and refolding, moulding it to
his hand like fine beeswax. It fitted perfectly now
in a strip across the outer ridge of his knuckles.
Experimentally, he flexed his fingers. Dull metal
rippled across them. Stepping in to face Caradoc,
he drew back his arm.

A horn sounded in the distance, a rising wail.
Mid-stride, both guards fell to attention, carved
statues of disappointment. A second detail
marched the length of the corridor and halted
somewhere behind the door. A password was
requested and given, both in guttural Latin. A
single man stepped forward.

Dubornos found a knot on the bare wood of the
pallet and rubbed around the edge of it with
the ball of his thumb. Counting the rhythm
slowed the screaming panic in his mind. On the
other pallet, Caradoc made a peak of his fingers
and rested his chin on the point. His hands were
still but the rims of his nostrils flared white and
one who knew him well could see that he fought
to steady his breathing. In the sweating gloom, the only sound was the rush of blood in the ears and
the nasal whistle of the taller guard's impacted
sinuses, faster than it had been.

The approaching feet stamped to a halt. The
door opened. A centurion of the Praetorian
Guard, resplendent in precious metal, said, 'The
emperor commands your presence.' When
Dubornos rose, stretching the stiffness from his
calves, he met a sword's point, at eye-height. 'Not
you. The leader only. Caratacus who defied him
for nine years. Claudius will see him now and
judge him.'

Dubornos said, 'Then you take me with him.'

'Not unless you wish your head to go as a gift
to the emperor.'

'If it's necessary, yes.'

'Dubornos, no. One of us has to stay. For the
children.' Caradoc rose smoothly, saluting the
guard as one officer to another. They shackled him
again at the wrists, crushing the bandages. Before they were done, blood was leaking onto the rusting metal. Raising both hands together, he made
something close to the warriors' salute to
Dubornos. 'The children,' he said in Eceni. 'Do
whatever it takes to keep them alive.'

'I will.'

Afterwards, when the sound of footsteps had
gone, Dubornos used the slop bucket and did not
care that the guards were watching.

XIX.

The children: do whatever it takes to keep them
alive.

Caradoc walked to the beat of the words. The
wrist chains chimed it, brisk as armour. He had no
idea how he could do anything to protect anyone.
It was enough to walk steadily, ignoring the old
and the new pain, and to close his mind to what
might yet come that was greater than either, to
acknowledge with courtesy the guards on either
side of the door to the audience room, to enter
into the presence of an emperor he despised and
display the demeanour and bearing proper to a
warrior and leader of warriors.

He passed from a poorly lit corridor floored in
black and white mosaic into an open, sunlit
audience room laid with vast slabs of finest red
porphyry, crimson as aged wine, unevenly
spattered with snowy flecks. The walls were of
marble-smooth plaster, painted crimson and decorated on the  far side with a frieze of the
monster Polyphemus, arraigned in unhealthy love
before the sea nymph Galatea.

On Mona, the singers told the myths and fables of Greece and Rome alongside their own.
Travelling bards of other lands had given them colour and performed them as plays in the greathouse.
As a youth taking ship to the sea ports of
Gaul to escape the long reach of his father,
Caradoc had seen attempts to bring them to life on
walls or ceilings, cluttered frenzies of paint created
by minor, unskilled craftsmen. He had never seen
them executed with such quality of purpose as he
saw in the imperial audience chamber, or with
such wild abandon.

An exhausted, pain-racked mind, seeking distraction,
could readily become lost in that frieze,
falling into the flowing colours and the -relief they gave from the concussive red of the walls and the naked passions so readily displayed, but Claudius
was there, somewhere, in the sunlight flooding in
from the garden, or more likely in the shadows it threw, so bright after days in half-darkness, so
bright---

Father!' 

In all the blood-red was a child: Cunomar, thin
and hollow-cheeked, his hair roughly cut, a great
scab on one earlobe. He was running, his arms wide open. Free. Six guards blocked the doorway, all armed. Who can tell their orders if a
headstrong boy skids on polished marble and
runs into them? ... do whatever it takes ... 

'Does a warrior run in the presence of an
emperor?'

The child faltered, his face crumpling. Caradoc
made the salute of one warrior to another and saw
its hesitant return and the indecision that followed
it. My son, we did not train you for this. I am so
sorry. Stepping forward, he scooped his son into a
shackled embrace, holding the tousled head close
to his shoulder. You weigh nothing; if you live,
your growth will be lessened. 'My warrior-to-be,
have the Romans treated you well?'

Safe, in his father's arms, the child chattered boldly. 'I had the flux but it got better. I'm well
now and the Greek physician with the long nose
let me eat proper food today, not the milk
porridge they gave me on the ship.' The small face
darkened, showing his mother's anger in
miniature, a thing to be cherished for itself alone. 'But he defiled Cygfa. He should die for it. And the
one who gave the orders.' Blessedly, he spoke
Eceni, but Claudius was famed for his mastery of
foreign languages and he was still there, watching
and listening, invisibly.

Caradoc said, 'I heard what he did. He, too
follows orders. The gods will take care of it. We may not do so here. Have you spoken with the
emperor?' 

'The old man with the palsy? He dribbles. He
touched my hair. I hate him.'

'But a warrior behaves always with courtesy to
his enemies, in victory and defeat.' We should
have told you this long ago, spoken it daily from
birth and before. Why did we not? 'Do you know
where the emperor is?'

'There, by the columns into the garden.' The
child pointed, but not usefully. His attention wandered and, with it, his arm. 'There are statues and fountains all the way along. Even the flowers
are planted in rows, the way the legions fight.
They leave nothing to the gods here.'

He had been right, then, to think the brooding presence sat in the denser shadows. Still with
Cunomar in the crook of his arm, Caradoc turned.

A row of columns broke the way through to the
garden. A thin voice from the shade of one said,
thoughtfully, 'He is very clearly yours. Your hair is
his and the stamp of you stands clear on his face.
None would doubt you his sire.'

Cunomar frowned up at his father, confused.
The words made no sense. No-one had ever
doubted that Caradoc was sire to Cunomar. Half
a battlefield had been present at his conception; he
had been told so often enough. Caradoc saw his
son draw a breath to ask thee obvious question and made a sign for silence. He was relieved beyond
measure to see it understood and obeyed.

The shadow-voice said, 'The child does not
understand Latin?'

The child had been taught Latin and Greek by
the best of Mona's dreamers, but the emperor's
Latin was archaic even by the standards of those
for whom Latin was a child amongst languages,
too new to be fully formed. One could not say
this. Caradoc inclined his head. 'He understands,
but only if the words are spoken clearly.'

'Then we will speak them so. Come here, boy.' If you harm him, you will die for it, if it kills all
of us, I swear it.

Smiling, Caradoc shoved his son gently in the
small of the back. The child stepped warily into
the sunlight, his straggled hair melted to a pool of
tarnished silver. The shadow-movement came
from the third column from the left and, this time,
Caradoc could see its origin; a man in his sixties,
showing his age, stooped at the shoulders, with
untidy grey hair and a weak chin and batwing
ears. He walked lame on his right foot and his
right arm was withered, shaking out of time with
the rest of his body. As not with other men, one
looked at his head last, after the withered limb. The
skin of his face was an unhealthy grey, blushing
overmuch at the cheekbones. His eyes were bloodshot,
with dark rings beneath from lack of sleep. In
the first moments of meeting, they shied away from
direct contact; one would not care to buy goods
from this man, or follow him into battle.

An unsteady hand reached forward to caress
Cunomar's hair. The boy stood rigid, his skin
flickering like that of a horse bothered by flies.
Caradoc stepped up behind him, granting the
comfort of a father's presence. The sunlight
scoured his prison-darkened eyes. The air smelled
too heavily of fruit and sweet autumn flowers.
With a little time, it became clear that Claudius
was the source of the strongest smell, of concentrated roses, and that it covered imperfectly
other scents of rosemary and pungent garlic and
underneath of old age and dried spittle.

'So clearly yours,' said the emperor wistfully,
and this time his eyes held contact a fraction
longer, so that soul, fleetingly, could meet warped
and pensive soul, could plumb the depths, of a
fierce, thwarted intellect locked in a marred body.
Caradoc felt ice track down his spine and fought
not to shudder.

Claudius smiled. 'They say your family has been
your first priority since their capture,' he said.
'And that their concern has been first for you and
then for each other. This is, of course, a truly
Roman virtue and most commendable. My wife
has expressed a desire to meet you and I have
allowed it. In fact, I have commanded all of my
family to meet you and your son. Together, you
are an instruction in what binds a family close in
love and in adversity.'

A brass bell decorated with geometric symbols
lay on a table close at hand. The emperor rang
a trilling peal. Echoing bells rattled on down a
corridor and were answered presently by the scuff
of footsteps. A youth only a little older than
Cunomar ran in with little ceremony although the
guards saluted as he passed between them.

Father greeted son stiffly, but gladly. Claudius
said, 'This is my son, Britannicus. He is named for
the conquest of your country. Your presence here
means he will be able to visit your province in
safety long before he becomes emperor.'

He cocked his head, the better to judge the
impact of his words. Caradoc smiled and let his
eyes take in the full length of the child. The boy
was flat-footed and small. His wavy mouse-brown
hair was not his father's, nor did his features carry
Claudius' stamp, a fact for which he may well
have been grateful. When he grinned at Cunomar,
he radiated an innocence and charm his father
lacked. He could have been any man's son. There
was nothing to mark him as Claudius' get.

'A fine child,' said Caradoc. 'I trust he will make
as fine an emperor.' If his stepmother does not
have him slaughtered to put her own son on the
throne. On Mona, it was not Claudius' son who
was considered most likely to be the next emperor,
but his stepson.

Claudius laid his good hand on the child's arm.
There was a pattern to his tremors: they were
worse when he was making decisions and stilled
afterwards. Reaching for the bell, he rang it again.
The violent shaking of his hand steadied as the
peals fell to silence. 'You must meet the remainder
of my family,' he said.

Caradoc, smiling steadily, retrieved his son and
brought him to a safe distance.

The stepson came first: Lucius Domitius
Ahenobarbus, known as Nero. He had been a
beautiful child and was growing into a beautiful
man, and knew it. The curled red-gold hair, hanging
longer than true Roman sobriety allowed, fell
lightly on his alabaster brow. He walked with the
careful tread of a dancer and the head-tilt of a
Greek actor of the old school, giving life again
to the young Achilles, but his skin was pure as a
girl's and his eyes were a girl's eyes, craving love.
For a breath's pause, balanced in the doorway,
facing his stepfather, he could have been Helen, confronting
the maddened Menelaus. A question was
poised on his lips, a request, a boon, that might have
been answered, but a cacophony behind him
drowned it unspoken, and his entrance, careful as it
was, vanished beneath the waves of his mother's
arrival.

In Rome, where women were given no power,
the Empress Agrippina, niece and wife to the
emperor, mother to Nero, had taken it with both
hands and held it tight to her breast. Like everything
else in her life, her entrance into the audience
chamber was a choreographed affair. The sound
preceded her, reaching those waiting while she was
still beyond the turn in the corridor: the measured
tread of her bodyguard, the murmurings of
Polybius, Claudius' religious secretary who had
become her man in all but name, the muted
chiming of gold on gold and the delicate
counterpoint rattling of pearls.

Clad in the totality of her wealth, a sum greater
than the entire tax revenue of Britannia in the nine
years since the invasion, Agrippina needed no
retinue to proclaim her regal. The bodyguard still
did their best and the shine in their eyes proclaimed
a devotion that was not felt by those
serving Claudius or either son. She emerged
between them, a vision in red and gold. The
audience room was her chamber, clearly; no-one else would have required the red of the walls so exactly to match the colour of her lips and the rubies at her neck. The soft, dyed doeskin of her shoes  blended  perfectly  with  the  blood-wine porphyry of the floor, the pearl buttons sitting proud as pale flecks in stone. Her hair, parted severely in the middle and pulled back to the nape of her neck, set about with hairpieces of jewel-studded gold,  could have  been sculpted from marble. Her stola was a whisper of red silk, bordered in imperial purple, and the skin of her arms, emerging from its folds, was as flawlessly white as sand on a northern beach. In every respect, she was the archetypal woman of Rome, a thing of plucked and painted beauty, brought to power through her husband and the violence of her intrigue. She was as far from Breaca as the trained and pruned flowers in the garden were from the oaks and hawthorns of an uncut forest. It was impossible to imagine them cast of the same flesh and blood. Caradoc, bowing, did not try.

Her eyes were aquatic green and they helda man's gaze for as long as his heart beat and beyond.  Caradoc bowed again, that he might avert his own gaze without causing offence. Faced daily with this, he too would have developed the shifting half-glances of the emperor. Nero, whose eyes were a pale imitation, but who nevertheless should have been acknowledged, was forced to shuffle sideways, to avoid the bodyguard.

The procession came to a halt, a spear's length from the doorway. The empress stared, unblinking, taking in Cunomar before Caradoc. 'The barbarian who cares so much for his children. How wonderful.'

The lady smiled, a practised flexing of painted lips. Claudius grinned with her in perfect, vacuous mimicry and it might have been a reflex, the true expression of the inner fool caught in the radiance of his superior, but that his eyes, swaying sideways, locked, shockingly, with Caradoc's. In that look was all the proof one could want that the rumours on Mona were true, that the emperor would deny his wife nothing, not the least whim, until such time as she stepped over some final, invisible mark - and then he would kill her as he had done her predecessor.' Perhaps the assassination of his only son would be that mark. Perhaps she knew it. Caradoc looked at the boy Britannicus and saw the rictus grin of fear stretch his mouth far more palpably than it did his father's. He knew where the danger lay.

'Is it necessary to shackle him so? We hold his wife and daughter, after all. He will not harm us, surely?'

Agrippina said it winsomely, tilting her head on one side. Her eyes blazed with guileless charm. The heavily painted lids blinked once, daring the prisoner to prove her wrong, to prove himself the better of the guards and of Claudius.

Still grinning, the emperor nodded. The nearest of the horse-guards reached for Caradoc, who
stepped back a pace and held himself out of reach,
taking Cunomar with him.

'I think not,' he said. 'It is better the chains stay
in place, my lady. In so beguiling company, I might
else forget too soon how I came to be here.'

The guard hovered, awaiting orders. The
empress's smile became brittle a moment, then
plastic again, a source of sympathy and amusement,
solace and the offer of freedom. The emperor ceased
to smile and looked on thoughtfully.

'It need not have been so,' said Agrippina at
length. 'Had you not set arms against us, you
would be welcome here as one of our subjects.
We would be discussing trade and the collection of
taxes, not the manner of your death and the fates
of your family.'

Caradoc inclined his head. With perfect civility,
he said, 'And I would be imposing an unwanted
slavery on an entire people, instead of simply
those of my blood.'

'But you would be free and rich from the
collection of taxes.'

'I was free before, and rich beyond measure,
without the imposition of taxes to keep others in
ancient gold.' His eyes swept the antique gold of
her neck chain, the Macedonian staters fixed
in her earrings. Rome had grown to power in the
three centuries since they were first minted.

The green eyes flashed. Agrippina, who had
spent her early adulthood in exile off Mauretania,
diving for sponges by order of Caligula, unhooked
a trail of pearls from one ear. Holding them high,
she said, 'I dived for these, and others like them,
twice a day, bursting my lungs to find them amid
the grasping weed and the dark places beneath the
sea. They are the product of no man's taxes. I
believe I have earned the right to wear them.'

They were small seed pearls, not very even,
hanging together like grapes on a vine, the only
imperfect items in the whole of her ensemble. She
rolled her fingers that they might catch the light
from the garden, then flung them high out over the
marble.

Caradoc lifted his hands against the weight of
the chains and caught them. Blood leaked from his
wrists to make small liquid pools on the porphyry.
Cunomar shuddered, biting his lip to hold silence.
On the far side of the room, Nero winced.

Ignoring them both, Caradoc held the pearls
high in the light, as she had. 'They are beautiful,
my lady. I do not question your right to wear
them.'

'But you do question my right to my gold.'

She was angry, but not yet vengeful. It was said,
of her that she admired courage above all other
traits and despised sycophancy. Offering prayers
to silent gods that the rumours be true, Caradoc
said, 'Among my people, gold is considered the
province of the gods. It cannot be eaten or ridden,
it provides no warmth against winter's chill. We
give it first to the gods as evidence of our
gratitude, and what is left we wear in their honour,
not our own.'

She was quick; she understood the words he left
unsaid. One painted brow peaked. 'And so the
gods should not be robbed so that men can pay
their gold in taxes?'

'I believe not. It is not only the gods that suffer,
but the people. Our land was our own; by the
grace of the gods we farmed it, we reared our
horses, we hunted, we bred our hounds, mined
our lead and tin, silver and gold, and we lived as a
free people. Why, because we have lost one battle,
should we submit ourselves to slavery that others
may grow rich on our labours?'

'That is the penalty for losing a war.'

'But we have not yet lost the war.'

Agrippina's lips parted fiercely. 'You will not
think that as you die.'

'But the governor, Scapula, as he dies, may do so.
He had spoken beyond himself, unthinking,
with words not his own. In the cracked silence that
followed, Caradoc felt the withdrawal of the gods as
a man feels a blade pulled out of flesh in which it has
just now been embedded. He had not thought himself
so ready a mouthpiece, nor that his gods desired
his death so urgently. He lifted his gaze to that of the
empress, expecting to see the work of a morning,
the careful weaving of care and courtesy, destroyed.
The lives of his two children hung on this woman's
care and her courtesy. Very badly, he did not want to
see either destroyed.

'My lady, forgive me, I-' My lady, forgive me,
I spoke out of turn. The last time I saw Scapula, he
was riding his horse across a battlefield he had just
taken. If he is dead, the gods know it, but I do not.

He did not say it because he was no longer given heed. The hard green gaze was focused beyond
him and quite unreadable. Claudius, too,
appeared to have forgotten his presence; he was
turned toward the doorway, his face searching,
like a blind man in winter who feels the heat of the
sun.

'Your excellency'

Caradoc turned. Between the guards stood aged
Callon, father to Narcissus, the elegant, tutored
freedman who ran the empire for his master.
Agrippina's perfect, painted lips twitched in open
disgust. In Claudius' court, the enmity between
the empress and those of the secretaries whose
loyalty remained solely with their emperor was
legendary.

Ignoring her, Callon signalled again to his
master and was invited to enter. Stooping, he
murmured in his emperor's ear. Claudius stopped
smiling. For a long moment, it seemed he might
faint; then he turned to his empress and her son.

'You will leave us.'

She glared at him, snake-eyed and venomous.
Silence stretched between them. At length, the
empress nodded. 'Whatever my lord commands.'
With consummate dignity, she gathered her son
and departed.

Unsmiling, Claudius turned back to the garden;
his treasure and his escape.

'You will walk with me,' he ordered. The sweep
of his arm included all those who were left.


xx.

'Scapula is dead.'

Narcissus, son of Callon and emperor's freedman,
was hysterical, or close to it. He stood in the
doorway to the prison cell, flanked by the horseguards
and two Praetorians. The evening before,
he had seemed to Dubornos urbane and allpowerful.
A man of middle height and middle
weight with dark, well-barbered hair and heavy
brows, he had commanded the guards and the
doctor, had procured the bandages and clothing,
food and wine, had spoken Latin and Greek with
equal fluency and displayed a working understanding
of Gaulish. His reputation had preceded
him as Claudius' most trusted adviser and the man
who had persuaded the mutineering legions to
embark on the ships which took them to Britannia
in the long-delayed invasion. Word on Mona,
brought months after the event, said that the
invasion itself was Narcissus' plan, his means to
consolidate his master's power and thereby his
own.

Daylight, leaking along the corridor from some
distant window, treated him unkindly. His skin
was yellowed with age and strain. Threads of
silver showed in his hair. His tunic, which had
appeared in the previous evening's lamplight to be
a model of restrained good taste, sparked at the
hems with silver and gold bullion in vulgar
quantities. He took a step forward into the room,
not quite close enough for Dubornos to strike a
hand across his neck and kill him. The guards
hovered protectively.

'Scapula is dead,' Narcissus said again. He ran a
pale tongue round paler lips. 'The governor of
Britannia has died in his bed. In Camulodununi,
they say it is the dreamers' work, in revenge for
our capture of Caratacus. Is this true?'

Dubornos said, 'It may be.' Horns sounded in
his skull, a great fanfare of victory. Joy made him
light-headed. His fingers sought the wall and pressed against the plaster for balance. The danger
to his own life seemed, at that moment, irrelevant.

'How would they do it? They have not come
near him - they couldn't. He is guarded day and
night. Can they kill at a distance?'

Warnings clattered in Dubornos' mind. He said,
'I don't know. I'm not a dreamer.!

'No.' The freedman snorted, horse-like, high in
his nose. 'You have only lived these past nine years
on their cursed island. Of course you don't know
their ways.' He pursed his lips explosively.
Violence and the threat, of it clung to him.
Caradoc had said, The man is shrewd, intelligent
and has no great lust for blood. He had chosen to
forget that Claudius routinely tortured to death
those who conspired against him; or that his
ministers did so in his name.

Narcissus' agitation brought him a further
stride into the room, well within reach. In his
head, Dubornos heard Caradoc's voice. They have
the children ... If there is anything we can do to
keep them alive, we must do it. It's all there is left. To kill the emperor's favourite adviser would
destroy any chance of Cunomar and Cygfa's
survival. Dubornos watched the man's arms and
the space above his eyes and his heart rocked in
his chest as it did before battle. An image of
Scapula, dead, floated before him, as real as the
room. He thought, Airmid will have done this, for
Breaca, and was sorry only that Caradoc was not
there to hear the news with him. Aloud, he said,
'Men die all the time, from war wounds,
pestilence, ill-prepared food. Why should the
governor's death be considered dreamers' work?'

From the passageway behind the guards, a
second foreign voice said, 'The tribes believe it to
be so and the legions with them. Word has spread
through the ranks that they used Scapula for
practice and will come now for his master, that
Claudius' life can be counted in days, not months.
The legate of the Second has flogged a dozen men
for sedition but the rumour still spreads like fire
through the harvest. If it reaches Rome, Claudius is
as good as dead.'

Callistus, secretary to the Privy Purse, stepped
past the guards and squeezed into the room. He
was slightly built with a narrow face and lips
artificially red. His hair was entirely white;
whether by birth or age or accident was not clear.
His eyes were bloodshot and if they had colour, it
could not be seen beyond the wide void of the
pupil. Like Narcissus, Callistus was panicked and
panicking men are as dangerous as fire-blind
horses. He said, 'Claudius must not die now, he
must not. You will tell us how your barbarian
soothsayers could reach Scapula and then how we
might stop them from similarly assailing the
person of the emperor. You will tell us of your
own free will or under harshest duress, but you will tell us.'

And so the waiting was over, so easily, with so
little forewarning. Relief and the apex of terror
made Dubornos dizzy. He laughed. They stared at
him; a lunatic, or a witless fool. His skin prickled
with the promise of pain. He rolled his shoulders,
feeling afresh the coarse scratch of the tunic as it
touched his back, his waist, his arms. The crush of
the shackle-wounds on his wrists felt warm and
comfortable, a known and measurable sensation.
Blood pulsed from his head to his feet and he
knew every part of himself. For the first time in
thirty-two years, he felt at home in the body he
was about to lose. As Airmid had said he should,
he stood on the dividing line between the worlds,
a foot on each bank of the gods' river, evenly. His
thoughts flowed freely, released from all
constraints.

'If you believe they are seeking revenge for
Caradoc's capture,' he said, 'you have one easy
recourse. Release him, return him to his family
and his homeland. Withdraw the legions from our
land. The emperor will live to old age and you will
be hailed, as heroes for having achieved it.'

Narcissus stared at him, a man who sees his
life's work threatened and counts its preservation
worth a hundred thousand other lives. 'We cannot
withdraw now from Britannia we will not. The
emperor's standing with the people depends on it.'

Callistus' priority was finance. He said, 'We
have invested too much to withdraw now. The
loans to the eastern tribes alone are worth forty
million sesterces; they cannot be recalled in time.
There will be another way. You will give it us.'

Dubornos shook his head sorrowfully. 'There
may be another way,' he said, 'but I doubt it, and
even if there were, I couldn't tell you. It's true that
I have lived for some time on Mona, but I am not
a dreamer; I was not privy to their rites. I would
have died for it had I ever tried to find out what
they were and that death would have been worse
than anything you could do here.'

Narcissus smiled, lips tight against his skull. 'I very much doubt that.'
'I don't. If I had defiled the dreamers'
ceremonies, I would have brought on myself everlasting
shame. Here, the shame is all yours.'

Narcissus stared at him a moment. Across the
gulf of cultures, there might have been some meeting
had Callistus not already snapped his fingers.
The guards came forward to take Dubornos'
arms. In the last moments, because he no longer
had anything left to lose, he fought them.

The knife was very sharp. It pressed into the skin
below Cunomar's eye, drawing fine 'beads of
blood. By looking down, he could see the bluegrey
iron and the thousand faint crosshatchings
scored on the metal where it had been ground
back and forth on the whetstone. They vibrated
under his gaze, but the knife was steady. It was his
own body that shook.

He looked past the knife to where his father
knelt on the cold marble, held still by two of the
horse-guards. The guards were alive only because
of Cunomar, that much was clear to them all. If his
son had not been there, were not being threatened
before him, the man who had slain a thousand
Romans would have slain a dozen more, up to and
including the emperor and his family, or would
have died trying.

Because of Cunomar, Caradoc did nothing, but
instead knelt where they held him with his gold
hair twisted tight in the grip of a guard's hand,
with blood sliding down from the newly opened
cut on his left cheek, scarlet against bone-white
skin. His lips were greyed, from anger or pain or
the vast, superhuman effort he was making not to
fight, and he spoke to Claudius as if His Imperial
Majesty were a slow-witted apprentice goat-herd,
which was as bad, really, as if he had truly fought.
There was nothing a child could do. Cunomar
stood very still so that the knife did not cut him
and watched an elegant bronze fountain splatter
water on the emperor's elegant garden. The water
came from the pipes played by a naked, goat-footed boy-child. It spewed out musically, to spray
a thousand rippling teardrops into the green
marble basin below. It was not good to think of
tears. He had long ago resolved that, whatever
happened, he would not weep. It was the only
thing he could do for his father and even this
much was hard. Over his head, the adults
conducted a conversation the implications of
which were too appalling to contemplate.

'Dubornos knows nothing. Whatever you do to
him, he can tell you nothing. There is nothing to
tell. If Scapula is dead, it is not the dreamers'
work. If they could kill at a distance, if they could
threaten a governor and the person of an emperor,
do you not think they would have done it long
ago? How many of them did Tiberius crucify?
How many did Gaius? How many have you?
Tens? Hundreds? If it were possible for any or all
to exact revenge, do you not think one of them
would have attempted it in the days and nights of
her dying? To believe otherwise is superstition and
it ill becomes a civilized nation.'

Caradoc spoke in the short, clipped tone that
made clear what he thought of the drivelling
imbecile standing before him. The sound of it
made Cunomar wince. The horse-guards not
directly involved stood still as carved marble,
staring rigidly ahead. In their very stance was their
terror. If a man could lose his life for speaking thus
to an emperor - and quite certainly he could -
then so, too, could those who had witnessed it.

Claudius was renowned for his secret trials and
summary executions. Callon, who had brought
the news of the governor's passing, had withdrawn
to a distance, as if half the length of the garden
were enough to render the guards deaf and thus
safe. Closer, a yellow cage-bird trilled. Liquid
notes poured into discord and were lost. Ignored,
it fell soon to silence.

Cunomar could sense the emperor's uncertainty.
The man had not known that his governor was
dead; the news brought by the freedman was as
unexpected as it was unwelcome. Given the facts,
his first thought had been for the spectacle of his
planned victory celebrations, his first emotion
anger at the thoughtlessness of his subordinate in
so untimely a death. Pressing his hand to his
temples as if his head pained him, he had said,
'He can't be dead. We need him for the procession.
Who will take his place?'

Callon had long dealt with his master's
priorities. With practised tact, he had said, 'We
will find another governor to replace Scapula,
your excellency, or we can excuse his absence and
substitute a representative. I believe it might be
best if his death were not widely known for some
time, perhaps until spring. But before that, we
must ensure your excellency's safety. The brother
knows nothing. He is unconscious; he fought and
the guards were over-zealous. They have been
disciplined, but he will be some time returning to
us. We may not have time. Answers must be found
by other means.'

'What?' Thus had the unnatural peace of the emperor's
ghastly, oppressive, flower-scented garden been
breached. Claudius and his freedman had
been speaking Greek, thinking themselves in
some measure secret, and certainly the horseguards
had not understood, but Caradoc
had been schooled on Mona where Greek had
been written and spoken for five centuries and
Latin was the upstart youth in a world of wise
and ancient languages. Even Cunomar had understood
enough to foretell his father's abrupt intervention.

'What exactly have you done to Dubornos?'
Caradoc had not attacked anyone, only stepped
forward a pace towards Claudius, his shackled arms rising, but the guards had not been of a mind
to give a man room to make himself plain. They
had treated it as an attack on the emperor's person
and responded as they thought fit. Horse-guards
were not employed for their subtlety, nor for their
respect for an enemy leader.

It was after that the freedman had withdrawn
and now there was only his father, catastrophically angry, facing a madman who had the power
to kill them all, or worse.

The children. Do whatever it takes to keep them
alive.

My son. Cunomar stood in the grip of the
guard, his skin tinged blue at the mouth, his eyes
round as river pebbles. Tears trembled on the
brinks of his lids and the effort he made to keep
them from falling was plain. My warrior-to-be.
You will die now, because of me. Cunomar, please
forgive me.

The guards' fingers goaded, twisting Caradoc's
hair. The shackles bit into his wrists. In the first
moments, they had been unlocked and locked
again behind him. They were drawn now high
up his back so that his joints cracked under the
strain. He had expected pain, had been steeling
himself against it daily since his capture until the
reality was almost welcome. He could breathe and
he could think and he could see that his son stood
unhurt and only threatened by a knife; that much
was bearable. What hurt far more was the loss of
his self-control and the descent into anger and
pointless violence, the unexpectedness of it, the
futility, the wasted opportunity. If the bridges to
Agrippina had been fragile before, they were
broken now, and those to Claudius shattered
beyond repair. Agrippina had been humiliated in
his presence and her pride would never let her forget
or forgive. Claudius was afraid and angry but
more than either, he was suspicious. The man had
remained alive through fifty years of tyranny
while those around him died like rats in a fire. His
intellect, steeped in subterfuge, had allowed him
to do so.

The emperor had regained control of himself
after the first high-pitched squeal and the scurry
for safety. The twitching arm was still, and the
head with its jug ears. His gaze was oil-smooth
with turbulent currents beneath. His soft voice,
rasping, said, 'You will apologize.'

'For what?'

'For attacking the person of your emperor.'

'You are not my emperor.' It should not have
been said. In the jagged cave of Caradoc's mind,
no room was left for diplomacy.

The emperor stood as still as any normal man.
He pursed dry lips, thoughtfully, and smiled. To
the guards he said, 'He will apologize.'

It had always been rumoured of Claudius that
he enjoyed the spectacle of inflicted pain. The
guards were practised at accommodating him.
The wrist-shackles twisted tighter and higher by
slow degrees. Iron cut through healing ulcers on
both wrists to grind the raw flesh beneath. Pain
came in nauseating waves so that, for a while, it
was no longer possible to speak or to think or
even to breathe.

For his son, if for no-one else, he would say
nothing. In the locked space of his skull, Caradoc
of the Three Tribes reproduced for himself every
syllable of unspeakable invective he had ever
learned through three decades of seamanship and
the leading of armies. He cursed in Eceni, in
Greek, in Latin, in Gaulish, none of it aloud. If he
were lucky, if he kept the image of Cunomar in the
front of his mind, he believed there was a chance
that unconsciousness might claim him before any
sound passed his lips. He closed his eyes and built
a picture of his son behind his closed lids but it
was Breaca who came when the strings of his right
shoulder tore apart and the darkness claimed him.

They pushed his head in the fountain to bring
him back and then drew it out again before he
could take the necessary breath that would kill
him. He emerged, gasping. The rasping voice was
closer, too close. Again it said, 'Apologize.'

'For what? Stating the truth? Is that lost now in
Caesar's court? I thought Polybius valued truth
and integrity above all other qualities in a leader.'
The gods gave Caradoc the words. He had neither
the strength nor the wit to find them.

Silence; and the falling water of the fountain. In
Rome, even water must be controlled.

Claudius' mouth was set hard. Only a small
smear of saliva betrayed him. It was said that he
held the old values dear above all else but there
was no way to know if that were true. He nodded,
weightily, a practised act, designed for the Senate
where rhetoric was valued above even valour in
war.

'Polybius was not dealing with barbarian soothsayers
who strove to kill him from afar,' he said.
'Truth, and integrity are marks of civilization.
Barbarians apologize to their emperor.'

The shackles were lifted and the twisting began
again in the opposite direction, more slowly than
before. They had no wish to lose him to unconsciousness again. To think clearly, to speak distinctly over the pain, was a warrior's challenge
set by the gods. On Mona, Maroc the Elder had
talked of Rome and what drove the fledgling
empire to war. Fragments of memory floated up
through the rising agony. Each was given such
breath as it needed to be heard while there was
still time. He spoke to the scholar now, not the
tyrant.

'The dreamers were civilized before Polybius
was a squalling babe ... before ever Romulus and
Remus suckled the she-wolf. If they kill now ... in
defence of their land and their civilization, does
that make them uncivilized? Rome kills and she is
not under threat.'

'But her emperor is.'

'Her emperor ... need not be.'
A finger was raised. The shackles were released,
Relief, briefly, was as debilitating as the pain had
been. The guards stepped back and they were
alone, Caradoc and Claudius: two men who led
their people, who could order death or its
suspension. The emperor blinked. The tremor
returned to his head. Indecision curdled the shiftless
gaze. Fear and the offer of safety fought with
power and the need to use it. The tremor acquired
a rhythm and became a nod. 'You knew the
governor had died. Did you order it before you
left?'

'No. I have no power to order the dreamers.'

'But they have chosen you to lead their cause in
war. If they have killed Scapula, it is because of
your capture. I believe they will listen if you order
them to recall their curse, or never to cast it.'

Airmid! Whatever you have done, I thank you. He had been powerless and yet was given a
measure of power. He fixed his gaze on the
fountain, not certain he could keep the understanding
from his eyes. Without looking up, he
said, 'You ask a great deal of one who has little left
to lose. Why would I so order the dreamers?'

'Because you value the life of your son.'

A straight bargain, like bartering iron for
horses. An emperor's life is worth more than a
single child. Caradoc said, 'And my wife and
daughter.'

'No. Both of these raised a sword against Rome.
Your wife was seen to kill many legionaries in the
battle. Your daughter killed one of the auxiliaries
who took her captive and wounded another
beyond repair. It cannot be allowed that women
bear arms in war.'

Caradoc dared to laugh. 'You would expect a
daughter of Caradoc willingly to submit to slavery
and rape? Would that make of your victory
celebration a thing of value? Would we remember
your ancestor, the deified Julius, for his victory over
Vercingetorix if that warrior had surrendered his
blade at the first hint of attack? Does not the valour
of the conquered give honour to the conqueror?'

Thoughtfully, 'We honour every victory gained
by our ancestors, those of the deified Julius most
of all.'

'And yet your conquest of Britannia is held in
such high esteem because Julius attempted it and
failed. By his actions are your own measured. If it
is time to strike when wrong demands the blow,
then surely it must be time also to show mercy
when right argues as strongly for it.'

The emperor stared. The grey, straggled eyebrows
rocked to the limits of his brow. 'You
would quote Homer, to me?'

'I would quote your own words to you. How
often have you said exactly that to the Praetorian
tribune before an execution? Even on Mona you
are famed for it. When a man becomes so readily
predictable that his enemies can put words in his
mouth, it may be time for him to consider a
change of rhetoric. You have a choice, by which
history will judge you. You can match your
ancestor, or you can exceed him. Gaius Julius
Caesar was renowned as a warrior, but not loved
for his magnanimity in victory. Scipio, who
pardoned the defeated Syphax, was both
loved and respected. The one may be valued more
highly by posterity than the other, or both
together.'

The guards became restless. Rhetoric had no
place in their world. The emperor signed them to
stillness. Slowly he said, 'Let me understand you
correctly. In return for your order to the dreamers
revoking their curse on me, you wish me to spare
the lives of your women and your son? You do not
beg for your own life?'

'I do not ask the impossible, but only what may
be freely given. In my place, would you not also
argue for the life of your family?'

Uniquely, Claudius' smile carried a flash of true
humour. 'My son Britannicus perhaps, but only
him. In this we differ. Your family, it seems, fights
only the enemy.' The smile faded. The emperor's
eyes fixed on a thing unseen, his gaze clouded.
Distantly he said, 'You argue well. I concede your
point. Your wife and children, then, will become
hostages for my life. If I die, they die. While I live,
they will live. They cannot be free but they will not
be enslaved. A place will be allocated them from
among the imperial holdings. Well? Can you do
this? Will the dreamers retract the curse at your
command?'

Caradoc nodded. 'I will do my best. They may
still listen to me, but I will need an intermediary,
someone to take the message who will be heard.
Dubornos would be one such, if he lives.'

'He lives. They would not kill him without my
consent. But he will die with you. I will not send a
warrior back to his country to continue this
rebellion. The prefect Corvus will take your
written message to Britannia. He is due to travel
with the evening tide. Between now and then, you
and he will find a way to convey your letter whither
it must go. I am told the dreamers can read and
write in Greek. They will return, in writing, their
confirmation that their curse is lifted. If it is received,
your wife and children will live. If not, they will die
as you die. Knowing this, you will exert every
pressure on those who threaten us.'

The emperor clapped his hands- once. The
guards advanced. Claudius smiled. 'Pen and ink
will be brought to your cell. Prepare your words
well. You are dismissed.'

xxI.

The sun rose more slowly than it had ever done.
Dubornos had lived through countless mornings
before battle when time had slowed to tripping
heartbeats but never before had it seemed entirely
to stop. He sat with his back to the wall, tightshouldered
to Caradoc, sharing with him the
space of one man that each might see what he
could of the creeping light through the high,
barred window of their new cell. They had asked
to see the dawn and this was the closest that could
be found commensurate with the emperor's order
that they be kept in close confinement.

The horse-guards had withdrawn as a courtesy.
They were no longer necessary for security.
Cwmfen and the children were hostages not only
for Claudius' life, but for Caradoc's death. Such
was the nature of the warrior's agreement he had
made with Claudius: for the price of a letter
written in Greek to Maroc of Mona pleading for
the emperor's life, andfor Caradoc's oath that he
would do nothing to impede his own prolonged
and very public death, a woman and two children
would be allowed to live.
Dubornos had no illusions as to his place in the

arrangements. He was an accessory, his death an
adornment to the main event, which was almost
upon them. He existed in a place beyond fear,
hollow and light, like a shell emptied of its snail
that becomes later an echo of the wind. On this
last morning, it was not the poppy that had
achieved this, but time. For the past fifteen days,
judicious use of the drug had dulled the stabbing
aches of the broken collar bone and the splintered
fingers of his  left hand achieved by Narcissus',
questioners, but it had not, at any time, dulled his
fear or emptied his mind.

The awakening dawn had achieved what
nothing else could. The closer they had come to
the day appointed for the emperor's procession
and the death of his two most notorious captives,
the greater Dubornos' fear had been, until this last
morning, when he had crested a wave of a terror
so overwhelming he had thought that, like a shrew
teased by a hound whelp, he might die of sheer
fright - and had emerged beyond it, unafraid.

Time nudged onward. The window was set too
high to see the horizon, or any part of the blazing
dawn, but the small square of black that had
been night faded slowly to grey and then to a
hazed blue threaded across with whispers of
flesh-coloured cloud. A dovecote woke nearby.
Squabs and adults roused with the light, warbling.

This time tomorrow, or perhaps the day after, it
will be over. The doves will call as they have called
each morning and we will be gone.

Dubornos could think this now without the
words running dry in his head. It was a fact to be
weighed with all the others and it counted for little
against the greater fact of his soul's loss, for his
failure, on this last dawn as on all those before it,
to connect with his gods. He leaned his head back
against the wall and, closing his eyes, searched
again in his heart for Briga who was mother of life
and death and for her daughter Nemain, the
moon, whose light had slid past the window in
the night, casting the iron bars in muted silver.
When these failed to respond, he cried in his echoing
mind for Belin the sun and Manannan of the
waves; being male they might find Rome more
acceptable. None of them came to him.

He remembered the spirits of the slain Roman
legionaries, wandering lost on the battlefield of the
Lame Hind, searching for foreign gods in a country
not their own and finding themselves abandoned.
He had imagined them weak, deficient in prayer,
lacking the true connection that comes from a life
lived under the eyes of the gods. Thus was hubris
added to his inner list of failings.

A grey-winged dove fluttered on the window
ledge, pecked at the ridged mortar surrounding the bars and flitted away. Dubornos felt Caradoc
stir and dared to interrupt his silence.

'Do you feel the gods?' he asked.

He thought for a while he had not been heard.
Caradoc sat as he had all night with the elbow of
his uninjured arm perched on his raised knees and
his chin resting on the heel of his hand. The slow
lift and fall of his breathing passed through his
body to Dubornos' but gave no indication of
his state of mind.

The patch of light on the wall grew brighter.
Outside, at the front gates to the palace, one guard
replaced another. Armour chinked and the night's
watchword was exchanged: Britannicus, name
of the emperor and of the emperor's only true son,
final proof of conquest.

More distantly, the earliest of Rome's risers, or
the latest of her retiring drunkards, called to each
other across the streets. A handful of men shouted
obscenities, their target silent and unknowable.
Presently, a woman laughed and was answered by
a single man. A dog barked and set off half a
dozen more, all higher pitched than any hound of
the tribes. The single lamp with which the cell was
lit cast fewer shadows of its own.

Caradoc was not asleep after all. Releasing his
fingers, he stretched carefully, taking care for his
ruined shoulder, with a rattle of cracking joints at
the end. He turned sideways on the pallet, the
better to see and be seen. The new light was harsh
on his face, highlighting the greyed pallor of
hunger and exhaustion. Night had been kinder.
His eyes alone burned clearly as they had always
done. It was impossible to imagine them lifeless.

Dubornoscaught his breath painfully. He said,
'Breaca will continue the war. She has the weight
of Mona's dreamers behind her, and the gods
behind them. It's all that matters.' He could say
her name now, at the end, without its damaging
either of them.

Caradoc smiled at the sound of it. 'I know. But
we are not abandoned.' He turned his face to the
window. The colourless light bleached his hair to
the white of old age. In profile, he was austere, not
worn. The rents in his tunic had been mended and
the serpent-spear brooch glistened on his shoulder,
a statement of defiance that would continue
beyond death. He said, 'Do you fear the coming
day?'

'No. Not any more.'

'Then we have all we could possibly ask for. The
opportunity to face death knowingly, to see ourselves
tested in the way that we face it. The rest is
ours alone. Afterwards, when it's over, the gods
will come.'

'Are you sure? The Roman dead wander lost in
our land. Is there a reason why we should not do
the same in theirs?'

From the doorway, a dry voice said, 'They did
not have anyone waiting who could restore their
souls to the care of their gods. Your dreamers will
know how to do it and when. It is a skill that has
largely been lost in Rome; the gods here are
worshipped for their ability to generate money
and power for the living, not their care for the
dead.'

'Xenophon!' Caradoc, delighted, rose in greeting,
as he might have done had Maroc entered, or
Airmid. 'I had not expected to see you again. Your
work here is done, is it not? We are alive. We have
not died of foul blood or broken bones. We will
remain in fair health until the emperor chooses
otherwise, at which point your intervention would
not be politically wise, or, I fear, effective, however
famed the teachers of Cos.'

It was said lightly, but not taken so. The
emperor's physician was not a man to deal in
trivia. He drew bony fingers down his long, bony
nose. 'Many things are taught on Cos,' he said.
'Not all of them are to do with preserving life.'

He stepped over the threshold into the room,
making the cramped space tighter still. They had
come to know the man well, this last half-month.
Since the audience with the emperor, they had
been his main charge, after Claudius, Britannicus
and the Empress Agrippina. He had dosed them
with poppy and infusions of leaf and bark until, if
the broken bones and torn joints had not mended
completely, at least the bruising around them had
lessened and the skin healed. They had come to
welcome the sight of his lean, stooped frame in the
doorway, as much for his company and the sharpness
of his conversation as for the medications he
brought and the orders he gave that they be
permitted use of the baths and provided with clean
clothing. When a junior officer of the horseguards
had argued this last, he had turned on him
the weight of twenty years' study and said starkly,

'You can't crucify a man if he's died of blood
poisoning beforehand. Did you want to take his
place in the procession?' There had been no
further objections.

The frequency of his visits had long ago numbed
the horse-guards to his presence. If they had
searched him at all this morning, they had done so
with their eyes closed. He bore two small flasks,
one in either hand, and a full pouch hung from his belt. Leaning the flasks against the edge of the
pallet, he sat down.

'Healing is not always about saving life. Every
physician knows that there are times when it is
better that the soul be allowed to depart cleanly.
To learn the rites of that passage, we of Cos travel
to Mona if we can, or listen to those who have
learned there. I have sat at the feet of dreamers
older than any now alive and learned only enough
to be certain that it would take me another lifetime
to learn those things they know and I'do not.'
He pressed the bridge of his nose. 'My memory is
not what it was and much of the teaching is lost,
but I remember enough to send you freely to the
river when the time is come. Before that, we have
those things I have learned from Rome. What
will happen today is not an uncommon event.
There are as many ways to die as there are men
to hammer nails into flesh. Some are faster than
others.'

He looked up at the window, frowning.
Footsteps trod the paving outside; a heavy,
masculine step, lame in one leg. When they had
passed beyond earshot, he said, 'I have spoken to
the centurion of the Praetorians who has charge of
... the necessary details. He fought against you in
the invasion battle and served at Camulodunum
after that. He is a soldier and respects his enemies.
He cannot go against Claudius' orders, but he has
some discretion as to their implementation. You
will not be stripped but left in full barbarian battle
dress, at least as Rome perceives it. I would advise
you not to refuse. It may not in any way resemble
what you would actually wear in battle but I
doubt they'll agree to hang you wearing a shirt of
stolen cavalry mail. Whatever, it is the weight that
counts. The heavier you are, the faster the' death.'

He was a doctor, and could say such things
without rancour or affected delicacy; in his
presence, two days of drawn-out dying were
reduced to a problem of engineering.

In this spirit, Dubornos said, 'If we're that
heavy, the nails will tear out.'

'If they do, it will be the first time. The
Praetorians have had more practice in this than
any of us would care to imagine. They use squares
of pinewood as washers to spread the weight and
drive the nails between the bones of the forearm.
You can trust that they will be secure.'

'If death comes faster, then the pain will be
greater.'

'No. That is, potentially yes, which is why I
have also brought you this ...'

The pouch he freed from his belt was of old,
weathered doeskin with a drawstring of plaited
linen, dyed a deep blood red. Stilted, side-on
figures painted in blue and yellow ink processed
across it. Some were recognizably human, most
were not. 'Alexandrian,' said Xenophon. He
prised the neck open as he might the mouth of a
patient. 'The pharaohs, too, knew what it was to
lose their way home and have to find it again in
the dark.' He drew out two twists of vine leaf,
each tied with the same red linen thread as formed
the drawstring. Opened, they contained a fineground
powder, as much as would fit in the
hollow of a cupped palm.

He held one out with great care; away from the
draught of his breathing. 'Each of these contains a
mix of belladonna, poppy and aconitum. The one
weakens the heart, the second, as you know,
numbs mind and body to pain and the third brings
slow paralysis to the legs. If you cannot take
weight on your legs, the pressure on the arms and
so the heart is greater and, with the belladonna,
death comes more swiftly. The poppy, if dosed
right, befuddles the soul, carrying it out of the
body. There is not enough of any to cause outright
death - I cannot do that unless I wish to join you
in death and my admiration for your minds and
hearts does not extend that far - but it is the
closest I can reach. The poppy will take effect
soon. The others will be slower, but you will be in
the company of your gods by nightfall, I swear it.'

It was a gift beyond price - and not one they
could accept in good conscience. Dubornos felt his
mouth grow dry. 'Xenophon, this is too much.
We're in your debt for your care of us this past
half-month. You must not put yourself in this
danger.'

The old man laid his treasures on the pallet and
leaned back on a wall, his arms folded across his
chest.

'The danger is in my being here. If you take this
before they come for you and the vine leaves are
secreted under the pallets, away from searching
eyes, it will not be any greater. Take it with my
blessing. The flasks contain Batavian ale, which
I am assured is to barbarian taste. If you mix the
one with the other, the taste will not be any worse
than the ale alone.'

His lips were pressed tight, and his eyes had
narrowed to slits, as if staring into the sun. A
lesser man might have been thought to weep.

Dubornos took the offered flask. 'Thank you,'
he said. 'In that case, we accept.' He turned, his
heart light, offering peace and oblivion to a
man he had come to admire above all others.

'Caradoc?'

Caradoc sat again on the pallet. The deepening
light from the window made spun gold of his hair.
His features were still, carved in marble and very
white. He stared at the open vine leaf as a man
might stare at a poised snake, awaiting the strike.
His breathing was shallow, an afterthought to the
struggle within. Presently, lifting his gaze from
the fistful of powder, he said to Xenophon,
'Can the poppy be taken out of the mix?'

'Hardly. I. ground them together myself. Even
the monkey servants of Anubis who can discriminate
the sands of the desert couldn't separate
them now.'

'Then, no. Thank you, but no. Dubornos should
take it - must take it - but I can't.'

'Really?' Xenophon studied this new phenomenon.
His tears, if they had been real, were gone.
'You have a need to experience such extremes of
pain? I had not thought you afflicted with Roman
vices.'

Caradoc laughed, a quick bark drawn from
somewhere beyond himself. 'No, assuredly not. It
would take longer than a month, I think, to
acquire that one.'

'Then why not the poppy?'

'Because this is not over yet. I need, at the very
least, to have a clear mind and to be seen to do so.
If I take poppy, I will fail in that.'

'Oh, my dear man.' Xenophon folded his long
limbs and sat, all straight lines and angles, like a cricket, on the pallet that had been Dnbornos'. In
the days they had known him, he had been brisk
and dry and they had thought him a rationalist to
the core. Here and now, in the tone of his voice
and the unashamed, undeniable tears that did,
indeed, fill the corners of his eyes, they saw the
depth of his care.

Leaning over, he took one of Caradoc's hands in
both of his own. 'My friend, you have more
courage than any man I have ever met, but you
have to learn, even this late, when to accept that
you have lost.'
With his chin, he gestured to the wall above
where sunlight slashed citron across the plaster.
'They will come for you before the sun reaches the
far edge of your window. You have that much time
to drink and no longer. I cannot reach the
Praetorian centurion in time now to change his
plan. He will carry out his side of our agreement
and that is not something I would wish on any
man. Please, I urge you, for your own sake and
that of your friends, take what is offered.'

'No.' It was easier to say it a second time. They
could both see that.

' Why?'

'Because even this late, when I have lost - and I
do know that - the children and Cwmfen are still
my responsibility. We have not yet received word
from Mona guaranteeing the emperor's life. Until
we do, their lives depend on my keeping my
bargain with Claudius, clearly and openly. I have
sworn that I will do nothing to impede his plans
for today. What you are suggesting steps beyond my oath, in spirit if not in word.'

'You think Claudius will keep his side of any
pact with such exactitude?'

'I don't know, but if he believes he has been
deprived of his just vengeance, he certainly won't.
I will not give him that excuse.'

On battlefields, in the preparation for war, in
nine years of constant armed resistance, Dubornos
had watched the breadth and scope of Caradoc's
will. Never before had he seen the sheer immovable
strength of it so plainly displayed. He
stared at the twin flasks and the mouthful of
powder that would have changed the manner
of his dying.
By this time tomorrow, or maybe the next day,
it will be over.
More likely tomorrow, without the powder,
unless the centurion was less than Xenophon
believed him to be, but the space between would
be worse than he had ever imagined. With a regret
as profound as any he had known, Dubornos
pinched the vine leaves together again, tying the
linen thread at their necks, and set them on the old
man's knees.

The physician's gaze stitched through his own.
Xenophon said, 'Claudius has no pact with you.'
'No. Mine is with myself alone. And Caradoc.'
Caradoc flinched. Colour flooded his cheeks.

'Dubornos, you don't'

'Yes, I do. And you have no power to stop me.
Don't try.'
The strength of his own conviction surprised
him. All the dishonours of his life, small and large,
linked together to point him to this one final act
of true worth. He smiled broadly and it was not a
sham. 'I, too, have pledged my life to the care of
the children,' he said.

Xenophon rose, his nostrils pinched tight.
'You're both mad - and that is a professional
opinion as well as a personal one. I have no gods
but I will pray to yours for a swift passing.'

Caradoc offered his hand to be shaken, Roman
fashion. 'We thank you sincerely for all you have

done. The risk you have taken today is no less
because we can't accept. If we had a way to repay
you, we would do it.'

The old man hesitated. 'Then, for my sake,
would you accept a visitor?'

Dubornos felt the hairs rise on his neck. The
gods may have abandoned him, but he had not
lost his ability to read a man's intent. In panic, he
said, 'Xenophon, no! Not now. Have you lost all humanity?'

'Not at all,' said a voice he had heard only in
dreams for half his lifetime. 'He thinks we will
make a tearful reconciliation. He knows us all that
poorly. It's a failing of Greek physicians; they
believe they can alter the fates of other men and
that they have the right to attempt it.'

The morning paused in its progress. In the free
world beyond the window, a dove bathed in a
fountain. Water sputtered finely on the outer wall of the cell.

Caradoc turned with exceptional slowness. The
cell was not built for four. Julius Valerius,
decurion of the first troop, First Thracian Cavalry
and, next to Scapula, the most reviled officer of
the invading army, stood just beyond the threshold.
He wore full dress armour, his mail polished
to silver fish-scales, his cloak the black of the
Thracians. His sword and belt were of cavalry
style, embossed with images of the empire's
heros. No man, seeing him thus, would have
deem him other than Roman. Only the small
insignia of the bull at his shoulder, drawn in the
way of the ancestors in ox-blood red on a grey
background, marked him as something apart;
that, and the searching black eyes, which mirrored
ones they had seen daily for nine years on Mona.

The room lacked air, or there was too much and
the pressure of it crowded the lungs; either way, it
was hard to breathe and harder still to think.
Forewarned, Dubornos, pressed a hand to the wall
for support and did not try to speak. Caradoc,
who had had no such warning, stared and went on
staring. The will that had commanded armies kept
his hands from reaching out to touch the man who
faced him. That will could not keep the shock

from his voice. 'Ban?'

'Ban of the Eceni, brother to the Boudica?' The
officer shook his head. 'Absolutely not. I am Julius
Valerius, decurion of the First Thracian Cavalry.
Ban died a long time ago at the hands of
Amminios, brother to Caradoc. I am not he.'

In denial, he made it fact. Stripped of the
armour, he was his mother's son; his hair was hers,
the high cheekbones and lean contours of his face,
the length and beauty of his fingers, the smile that
began in mischief and had once ended in joy. All these combined made him the child they had
known and all were soured beyond imagining to
shape a man they could not begin to know. Still,
he was Ban.

If the guards had slain Cunomar and Cygfa and
thrown their heads at his feet, Caradoc might have
managed himself better; that at least was within
the realms of his imagining. The dignity, the
wrappings of self-control so carefully nurtured to
sustain him through the coming day, fell away,
raggedly. His gaze switched from the figure lounging
in the doorway to Xenophon and back again.
On the third pass, his eyes settled instead on
Dubornos. A glimmer of intellect returned to light
the wreckage of his mind. 'You knew,' he said.
'How long have you known?'

'Since the mountainside when we were taken. I
wasn't certain at first, but then he gave me his
knife to release Hail from life because he couldn't
remember the words of the invocation to Briga.
Who else in the world would have done that?'

From the doorway, the too-familiar voice said
acidly, 'You knew before that. At the salmon-trap
in the Eceni lands five years ago, you knew me as
well as I knew you.'

Dubornos shook his head. 'No. I knew only that
you hated me, not who you were or why you felt
so. I had spent too many nights warding the
dreamers as they strove to recover your lost soul
and return it to Briga's care. In the chaos of battle,
one does not expect to see that same soul living
and fighting for the enemy.' For nearly two
months he had lived with the knowledge of this
and had chosen to forget. Faced with the living
reality, the enormity of it left him dry-mouthed.
'Do you think if I had known you, I would have
rested until you were dead? We loathed you,
believing you fully Roman. How much more so
had we known the depth of your betrayal?'

'How much indeed?' The black eyes mocked
him. 'I'm disappointed. I really thought you knew
who I was. All those years of vengeance, wasted.'

Dubornos hissed air through his teeth, unable to
speak. Distractedly, Caradoc said to him, 'Why
did you not tell me?'

'What point was there? Would you go to your
death better knowing that Breaca's lost brother
had lived beyond Amminios' attack and had
returned to slaughter his own people? Would
Cunomar live better afterwards knowing that his
own uncle was the one who had enslaved him?
The boy has worshipped the memory of Ban
Harehunter, saviour of Hail, since he was old
enough to hear the tales at the fire. It would do
him no good to know the great deeds of the past
are wiped out by the calumny of the present.'

He had spoken with intent to wound and saw
his effort wasted. Valerius lounged, smiling, in the
doorway, untouched and untouchable.

Caradoc was more direct. Until then, they had
been speaking Latin, as a courtesy to Xenophon.
He changed now to Eceni and, speaking as an
elder, giving due weight to his words, said, 'Ban,
son of Macha, brother to Breaca. For the boy you
were, for your own sake and your sister's, I would
gladly have given my life. For the evil you have
become, if your emperor did not hold the lives of
my children as hostage, I would kill you where
you stand.'

'I have no doubt you would try.' The man who
was Ban and yet not Ban replied in Latin,
pointedly. 'Which is precisely why your children
did not die on the hillside above the river that
marks the site of the governor's last resounding
military victory. There are more ways to defeat a
man than simply to kill him in battle.'

It was a practised taunt, the edge dulled with
inner repetition. Baldly, Caradoc said, 'Scapula is
dead.'

'I know. I brought the news to Narcissus.
Doubtless I will follow him. The dreamers have
their mark now, it won't take them long to find
those of us they hate most.' Valerius smiled, wolflike.
'It is good to think you will have made the
journey ahead of me. I would have hated to die
with Amminios' favourite brother still living.'

Dubornos laughed. 'Are you insane? No-one
could believe that Caradoc ever lived in
Amminios' favour. They loathed each other and
everyone knows it. Amminios betrayed all of us to
Rome. Caradoc and your sister were each sworn
to kill him on sight. If he had ever had the courage
to return to his father's dun, he would have died
within the day.'

'Ban believes otherwise, does he not?' Caradoc
had control of himself again, He settled back on
the pallet. His eyes searched the other man's face,
absorbing those things that had changed
and those that had not. 'The last time we met,' he
said carefully, 'you defeated my brother in a game
of Warrior's Dance as long and hard-fought as any
battle. Afterwards, I swore to attend your longnights
and speak for you before the elders. I
learned the details of your death - we really did
believe you dead, I will swear that by any god in
whom we can both trust - only when I returned to
Eceni lands in fulfilment of my oath. In none of
that would you have had reason to believe I held
any love for Amminios. You knew the depth of
hatred between us.'

'But still you betrayed my sister, my father - all
of us - to him before you left to take ship for
Gaul.' He was a child again; they all heard it.

'No.' Caradoc was standing now, his head high,
his anger no longer restrained. With quiet force,
he said, 'Whatever Amminios told you, whatever
you chose to accept, you cannot believe that I
would have damaged Breaca. I won't allow it.
Your sister is my heart and soul, the rising of my
sun in the morning. She has been from the first
meeting and will be until I die and beyond. I
would no more betray her than I would cut the
throat of our newborn daughter. If Amminios told
you otherwise, he was lying to hurt you.'

'Or he was telling the truth to achieve the same
end?' Valerius' lip curled. 'The sons of Cunobelin
were ever famed for their quick ways with words.
You may squirm now to save your dignity but I
overheard your brother speaking of it to his factor
at a time when he had no idea I was listening. He
had no reason to lie; you have too many to count.
In this, I choose to believe the dead before the
almost-dead.'

'You would believe Amminios over me?'

'Yes.'

It was said with perfect certainty. Only his eyes,
at last, betrayed the first edge of doubt.

Dubornos took a step towards him. 'Ban, you
don't believe--'

Caradoc said, 'But he does, he needs to. His life
has turned on this, hasn't it, Valerius?' He spoke
in Eceni, the single Latin name harsh in the flow
of rounded syllables. 'What other lies did
Amminios tell you? Did he say that your family
were all dead and there was nothing to come home
to? That you would be blamed, perhaps, for the
defeat at the valley of the Heron's Foot? He could
lie so well, my brother. I know; I grew up in the
shadow of his tongue. I took to the sea at twelve
to escape it. But you had no escape, did you?
Amminios had closed all the routes. What would
you have done if you had known at the time that
Breaca was still alive after the battle? Would you
have come home to find her, to fight at her side in
the invasion? Even to die for her?'

He spoke to a ghost. Ban stood in the doorway,
bone-white, his eyes black holes in his skull. He
swallowed and opened his mouth and no sound
came out.

Caradoc said, 'If you had the chance now,
would you still--'

Dubornos laid a hand on his shoulder. 'Enough.
Stop now. He knows. There is nothing to be
gained by making it worse.'

Ban - Valerius - found voice enough to laugh.
'Worse? There is nothing you can say that will
make anything worse. You are lying - every word
confirms it, and it counts for nothing. It would be
amusing to talk more, but the emperor orders
otherwise. The crowds must be entertained and
they find the death of others most engaging. Very
soon your dying will begin. Eventually, it will end.
Afterwards I will continue to serve my emperor
and my god to the best of my ability until your
cursed dreamers--'

'Stop.' Caradoc could still lead, effortlessly. The
once-Eceni stopped in mid-sentence, his mouth
agape. A flash of anger gathered and fell away as
Caradoc said, 'Listen ...'

Dubornos listened and, unwilling, heard. Time
had moved on. The citron sun had passed beyond
the limits of their window. Outside, a half-century
of men marched at parade pace up the hill towards
the palace. A cartwheel squealed, wanting oil, and
halted outside at the end of the corridor.

The fear, so long held at bay, rushed to return.
Dubornos swayed, light-headed. Ban stared at him for a lingering moment and then spoke
past him to the physician standing at the back of
the cell.

'Xenophon, you should not be here.'

'And you should?'

'Yes, of course. Forgive me; I became diverted
by the amusements of our captives. I am to lead
the prisoners in the procession and escort them
to the tribunal. Claudius commands it. He
requires a man who speaks both Latin and Eceni
to translate the final speeches.'

They had been speaking Latin for over half their
conversation, faultlessly. Caradoc said, 'We need
no translation. Claudius knows that.'

'Nevertheless, it will be done. The emperor
wishes his defeated barbarian savages to be truly barbarian. It goes against the grain to execute a
man who speaks Latin better than half the Senate.'

XXII.

I am Julius Valerius, decurion. I am sworn to the
infinite Sun. Mithras, Father, help me.

The words ran in Valerius' head, marking time
with the beat of the small drum by which each
part of the procession was driven. They gave him
little solace. No part of the emperor's triumphal
parade was going to plan. At the most mundane
level, the white, blue-eyed mare he had been
loaned was afraid of mules and riding her close to
the prisoner's mule-drawn carts took more than
half his attention. Beyond that, he was assailed on
all sides and it was not only the prisoners who
were the enemy.

From the procession's first creaking progress,
the crowd lining the parade route had been
difficult. The vast majority of Rome's population
had already gathered under awnings on the plains
in front of the Praetorian camp where the
culmination of the parade was scheduled to take
place in the third hour before noon. The
thousands who had lined the via Tiburtina were
the dregs of the city, those lacking either the influence
or the money to gain a worthwhile stance
on the plains.

They had been enough to hamper the procession's
progress. In the beginning, it was the
quantity and quality of the precious metals on the
carts that had caught the crowd's attention. Every
item of gold and part-gold taken from the tribes of
Britannia and presented to the emperor, his wife,
his sons and his freedmen had been loaded onto
eight long, low-sided platforms, the better to be
seen by the people. The morning sun had made
of them a lake of flocculent butter, each item
lost in the dazzle. Torcs of twisted gold wire
hooked through others of hollow metal sheet
embossed with wild animals and scenes of battle;
enamelled armbands a hand's breadth wide
gleamed near delicate, intricate necklaces of gold
and silver, amber and pink coral; silver mirrors
thrown in at random made moons in the shining
day.

It was an impressive display. Inspired by it to
holiday mood, slaves, lesser merchants and their
filthy, snot-nosed children had run alongside the
procession or, easily outrunning the mules, had
taken short cuts through back streets to come out
ahead and watch the carts pass again.

Captives had followed the spoils, providing
even greater entertainment. First had come four
carts of women and children destined for slavery.
Those bearing the scars of battle had been placed
on the inside, that the people might not readily see
the evidence that barbarian women fought alongside
their men.

Nearly two hundred men followed, all acknowledged
warriors. Already some wore gladiatorial
armour, if not yet their weapons. Their public
combat, in pairs or groups, had been scheduled for
the following day. A hundred tall Numidians had
been hand-picked to fight against them. Thus would
the two barbarian ends of the empire be brought
together, each demonstrating their inferiority to
Rome.

Last in the procession came the family of the
rebel king, Caratacus; his wife and two children
had been granted a cart'to themselves. The two
women were dressed in modest white linen,
moderately clean. They stood upright with commendable
dignity and had not been chained. The
boy Cunomar swayed between them. A beautiful,
almost feminine child, he bore the marks of recent
bruising about his face and his hands were bound
behind him with cord; an afterthought, or an
emergency measure against a child's instinct to
fight his captors. Women in the crowd cooed as he
passed and some of the younger men blew noisy
kisses. His face became paler and more fey as the
cart ascended the hill.

The family was followed at the last by
Caratacus himself, the barbarian king who for so
long had spurned the rule of Roman law and
would pay the price. For a while, the crowd had
been impressed by him.

Bigger than the others, his cart was drawn by
two grey geldings with black trappings and black feathers in their brow bands. The horses were
pale, almost white, and someone with more
imagination than experience had painted swirling
whorls on their quarters and flanks with deep grey-black river clay to represent barbarian woad.
Later, a legionary who had served in the invasion
forces and knew more of what he was about had
added the sinuous lines of the serpent-spear in ox-blood
red on their outer shoulders.

The man himself stood tall in his chains, his eyes
straight ahead, as befitted his rank. His dress was
pure barbarian; his tunic, breeches and cloak were
of rough wool in loud Gaulish check with his only
armour a leather corselet stitched about with the
crudest of metal plates, some so poorly polished
they could have been lead and not iron. His
brother, standing alongside, was a poorer
imitation, the lesser in all respects, including his
inability or unwillingness to maintain a dignified
silence. He spoke constantly to the officer at his
side, ignoring his status as prisoner.

From Valerius' perspective, the trouble had
started in earnest when Dubornos began to pass
comment on the things around him. They had
been crossing an intersection. Sunlight leaked
between tall buildings, the houses piled on houses
that kept the populace of Rome concentrated
within an easy walk of the forum. Here, costs had
been cut and margins creamed; the windows were
placed so close together that a whore could lean
out of one and offer her services to a man at the
other and he, if he were daring and chose to
believe the building might remain upright for the
duration of the transaction, could clasp her hand
and accept. Along the length of the street, mortar
flaked from the lintels and gaps with streaks
of green slime below showed where roof tiles had
slipped and gutters failed.

Dubornos had said, 'I have seen two grandmothers
walking the streets, both lame, neither
supported by a youth to be their eyes and limbs as
would happen even now in the tribes.'

The soft, rolling Eceni fell into the crowd and
was not welcome; those for whom his death was
the day's entertainment resented being excluded
from his pleadings. Someone hissed. Others began
the low, pulsing groan that greeted the loser of
gladiatorial combat.

Ignoring them, Dubornos said, 'Were you not
the eyes and limbs to the elder grandmother after
your sister sat her long-nights? Does it not shame
you to be part of this? Does your god look on and
feel his people well cared for?'

'My god is not your-' It had been a mistake to
answer. Silence had been Valerius' best - his only
- defence. The mare jerked her head and a small
cheer rose from a different part of the crowd, congratulating
the captive on his strike; not all of the
city's population favoured the legions.

Whatever their allegiance, the masses wanted
most an excuse for a riot and were close to finding
it. 
A hand's length of firewood bounced on the edge of the cart near the mare's eye. She skittered sideways, her hooves sliding on the metalled road.
Her hindquarters knocked up against a doorway and hit something soft.  A woman screamed from low down underfoot.

Caradoc, who had been silent since the cart had left the prison, said distinctly, 'Watch yourself, fool.' The tone of it stung.

Valerius hauled on the reins, swearing in Thracian. The mare backed out of the doorway,
Lifting her feet too high. Beneath them, bleading freely but still living, the drunken, part-blind beggar-woman who had chosen it for her night's rest lay on her back with her legs splayed, yammering incoherencies.  Her left leg was withered from the thigh down.  Her left wrist, which had been whole when she lay down to rest, was broken.

'Help her, god dam you!'

It was said in Eceni, but the meaning was clear  to the entire crowd. Somewhere, a man laughed
coarsely. 'Go on, decurion, get her up. Look what
she's offering. How can you resist?'

A small group of youths near to the old woman
began to cat-call, as they would a prostitute out alone too late.

'Ban for god's sake -'

I am not Ban. I am Julius Valerius. Your gods
are not my god.

In the time it took to think this, to repeat it,
seeking certainty, Valerius lost control of the
crowd. Caradoc's voice had cracked like a whip
above the tumult, losing him what small sympathy
his position might have garnered. The  crowd
booed. From the rear ranks, someone made the
sound of a horn blowing the legionary order to
advance.

The driver of the captives' cart, who had been
chosen for his youth and beauty before any ability
to deal with complex matters of imperial
decorum, let the grey horses idle to a halt. Caught
by the noise, the teamsters driving the mule carts
did likewise; their orders had been to keep the
procession intact. The cat-calls, trumpet-noises
and whistles grew to a common jeering, gathering
rhythm with volume.

Valerius cursed, looking round for help. He had
dealt with crowds often enough to know their
patterns. Soon, they would begin the slow, taunting
hand-clap of the circus and soon after that
there would be blood; the century of Urban Guard
escorting them was not enough to prevent it. A
movement on the cart caught his attention.
Swearing passionately, he wrenched the mare
back.

Caradoc was contained, but only barely so. A
Praetorian legionary was at the cart's side; his
drawn sword was all that prevented the prisoner
from jumping down.

Dressed in the ludicrous lead-stitched armour,
with clay sworls flaking from his cheeks, Caradoc
radiated anger. His eyes locked with Valerius'. If
ever the one god lived in a man, he did so now.
The blazing gold hair was the newly risen sun, the
fury fuelled by centuries of imperfect worship. In
perfection was beauty and astonishing nobility
That it should come here and now, in this man,
was unthinkable sacrilege. Valerius felt his
diaphragm clench and fought not to vomit.

The grey gaze could not be broken. The
immeasurable voice of the god said, 'See to her. Now.'

The part of himself that dismounted and knelt
by the old woman was not one that Valerius
remembered with any certainty. When he spoke, it
was at first in a language he had neither heard nor
spoken in nearly twenty years. With considerable
effort, he set aside the tongue of his ancestors and
repeated his question in Eceni, Gaulish and finally
Latin, working his way from distant youth to
adulthood. Only at the last did the old woman
understand him. 'Grandmother, where are you
hurt?'

She tilted her head, searching the blind, noise-filled
horizon for his voice. 'My arm,' she said
querulously. 'My arm hurts.'

He took her left arm firmly, above the break.
Her skin was greasy and fragile at once, not at all
like the elder grandmother of his past. She stank of
rancid wine and urine and neglect. Inwardly, he heard the voice of his own childhood, I swear to
be your eyes and limbs, until time or the gods
relieve me of it.

From the same place, an old woman in a
badger-skin robe said, You abandoned me. I
had no-one. Could you not have come home for
me?

Shaking his head, he leaned closer. 'Your wrist is
broken,' he said. 'It was my horse who trampled
you. You will be recompensed and a bone-setter
found. Is there anywhere else that hurts?'

'My chest,' she said. Awareness of it made her
cough, liquidly. Blood threaded her spittle.

Valerius sat back on his heels and forced himself
to think coherently. I am Julius Valerius, decurion,
Lion of Mithras. He was in the suburbs of Rome,
in a hostile crowd, in a procession whose timing
had been arranged with utmost precision. Already,
the delay was such that he faced possible death. If
it lasted longer, he would be lucky not to join his
foes on the nearest free cross. Whatever Caradoc
might say, however he might be supported by the
returning ghosts, Valerius had neither the means
nor the time to aid a crippled grandmother.

He propped her up in the doorway. 'Stay well.
If I am alive when this is over, I will come back for
you, I swear it.'

The guards had surrounded the cart, standing
face out with their swords drawn, keeping the
mob at bay. The centurion was named Severus and
he had served on the Rhine in the time of Caligula.
Valerius caught his eye. 'Get the cart moving.
Clear the way. If any of us is to live, we need to be
at the edge of the plain in front of the camp before
Claudius reaches it.'

The officer grimaced. 'Do you think the
muleteers can get their beasts to run up the rest of
the hill?'

'They can if they understand their lives depend
on it.'

I am Julius Valerius, decurion of the first turma,
the Ala Prima Thracum ...

By the beat of the drum, Valerius knew where
he was. His orders were etched in acid on his liver;
he could have carried them out blindfold, with his
ears stopped with wool, which was as well when
the ground before him was so uncertain and the
words he heard most clearly were in Eceni and all
from the past. What had been merely unpleasant
was descending unchecked into nightmare. Ghosts
of all his ages crowded on him, clamouring. They
had not come at him so vividly in daylight since
his time in slavery to Amminios. They were not yet
close enough for him to hear the words precisely,
but that made no difference; Caradoc's voice
replaced theirs, echoing from the prison. What
would you have done if you had known at the
time that Breaca was still alive after the battle?

The god had asked the same question, and,
forced by the presence of deity, Valerius had
answered honestly. Here, on the emperor's plain in
the emperor's procession, he would not - could
not do the same.

I am Valerius, decurion, sworn Lion of the god.
I serve my emperor with my body and my
god with my heart and soul ...

If he spoke aloud in the vault of his head, he
could hold on to his sanity. He dared not close his
eyes. The officer in charge of the procession was
Marullus, centurion of the second cohort of the
Praetorian Guard, the one who had branded
Valerius in a cellar in another lifetime, his true
Father for ever under Mithras' care. His presence
burned as the sun, keeping the god in focus, but
did not dispel the voice or the memory of a man
who had reached divinity and did not know it.

Caradoc is not the god. He never has been. If it
seemed otherwise, it was the ghosts' doing.

Out on the plains, nine cohorts of Praetorians
and three of the Urban Guard less the one
century that was detailed to march with the
prisoners - lined in perfect ranks before their
camp; nearly six thousand men, armed and
trained to the highest level the empire could
achieve. From a distance, all that could be seen
was the blinding reflection of polished helms.

Closer, the wavering sway of the officers'
plumes stood proud like reeds fanning a lake of
silver. Ban's mother - Valerius' mother - walked
between them as if they were trees, a wren flying
high above. He had found her charred body lying
on a pyre after the invasion battle and had
watched her soul begin the journey to the other
world. He had not seen her since. His father, too,
had been absent since the final day of the invasion
battle. He stood squarely ahead of Valerius now,
his shield face-on and his spear readied so that it
would be impossible to ride forward except
through him. It was best not to think of that.

The ghosts were fewer to the left, where the
crowd waited. Looking over his shoulder, he could
see them, a great massed array standing facing the
militia, separated by a space of a mere ninety feet.
They were less tangibly ordered but the layerings
of rank and influence were no less distinct.
Between these two, the paired tribunals of the
Emperor Claudius and his empress, Agrippina,
occupied a position of utmost visibility and
dignity. Fifty senators, picked for their seniority,
were seated on benches a short distance away,
conspicuous both by their position and by their
separation from the person of the emperor. In the
open ground between them waited the shade of
Iccius, the Belgic slave-boy who had seen the last
days of Ban as he was and whose death had
triggered his birth as Julius Valerius, officer in the
emperor's auxiliary cavalry.

I have stood in the presence of the Bull. Dear
god, I have touched the Bull. Why will you not
take this away?

The timing of the procession did not allow for
incapacity on the part of one of its leading figures.
At precisely the appointed moment, to a briefly
deafening fanfare from the cohorts, forty-eight
sweating, heaving mules dragged their laden
wagons forward into view. Slaves in sombre dress
carried choice items alongside: shields of carefully
worked bronze, the best of the mirrors, neck,
chains in solid gold set about with amber, jet and
blue enamel. Through the jabber of his mind-noise,
Valerius heard a blanket of silence fall on
the humming conversation of Rome's populace.
This, at least, was predictable. No crowd in the
world is so jaded that gold by the wagonload
does not inspire the hush of avarice; however
short-lived.

After, the tide of conversation rose again to a
muted roar, louder than it had been. Goldsmiths
and jewellers strained forward to see the
intricacies of individual pieces. Others, who might
perhaps commission an imitation, took note of the
weight of the pieces and the more distinctive
styles. In the other world that clashed with this
one, a hanged Eceni girl child, three years old,
skipped beside a cart, swapping the frayed rope at
her neck for a necklace that had been her
mother's. Valerius did close his eyes then. When he
opened them some time later; the child, at least,
had gone.

The wagons were spaced apart so that the first
had passed halfway across the parade area and the
dust of its passing had begun to settle before
the second had fully started. They moved in
crescent, beginning near the Praetorians, curving
in towards the crowd and coming back to a
station just behind the imperial tribunal where 
they were covered, temporarily, with hides. When
all eight had completed their procession,and were lined
up together, the coverings were pulled back 
in unison, allowing the sun once again to meet the 
gold. The sudden blaze of reflected light  made  a
fulgent halo around the emperor, blessing him. As
one, the crowd vented a long- drawn sigh.  In the world between the worlds, the ghosts pretended
awe which, having lived amongst the gods, they
could not possibly feel.

Only the prisoners remained unmoved. From
the wagon at Valerius' side, Dubornos said, 'Luain
mac Calma did it better for Cunobelin.' It was not
clear from his speech or demeanour whether he,
too, saw the ghosts. Valerius hoped not.

Caradoc said, more thoughtfully, 'The
Trinovantes said that your emperor considered
himself a god. Until now, I had not believed it
true.'

Valerius stared into the blistering light until his
eyes hurt. The gods of his past and his present
hovered on the edge of imagining. Claudius was
not amongst them. He would not allow Caradoc
to be. What would you have done if you had
known ...

'You will believe it as you die,' he said. 'Better
men than you have called on Claudius to release
them from life, naming him first amongst their
gods. You will be no different.'

He wanted them to disagree. Caradoc nodded.
'Our saying it will not make it true.' The ghost of
Eburovic, father to Ban, agreed with him,
sorrowfully.

A whistle blew from beneath the scorpion
standard of the Guard. The carts bearing women
and children rolled forwards onto the plain. The
gossiping crowds fell silent, not in appreciation,
but in mannered boredom. The slave auctions
would draw their interest again; until then, this
was a necessary part of the spectacle but not one
to speak of later at dinner. In the hush, the
murmurings of business associates could be heard,
using the time to deal with other matters. Valerius,
sensitized as he had not expected to be, noticed
that the warriors amongst the women had moved
to the outside and made a ring about the mothers
with children. Their dignity was wasted on an
inattentive crowd. A multitude of ghosts wept for
them, bitterly.

The wagons of men came next, outstanding for
their height and the barbarity of their dress,
or their shameless nakedness and the outlandish
markings on their skins. In the last cart were three
dreamers who were also warriors. They saw what
their countrymen did not. All three acknowledged
Macha as they passed. Among the Romans, none
save Valerius saw the gestures. The greater mass of
people craned their necks to see the rearmost two
carts: the family and the rebel king himself. Of the
rest, Dubornos, who was more than halfway to a
dreamer, began to understand. Watching him,
Valerius saw the moment when his vision changed
and the ghosts became part of his present.
He acknowledged them, smiling with unfeigned joy.

'If it is Mithras who holds the souls of the dead 
as your myths teach, one could find it strange that 
he calls on the soul of an Eceni dreamer to stand
watch over her son. Do you think perhaps instead 
that-' 

'I think nothing. And we are moving. If you 
speak while the carts process before the people, 
the guards have orders to tear out your
tongue. The ghosts of your past will not stop them.'

He was not certain of that, but he spoke with
the certainty and authority of an officer and it
seemed he was believed. Dubornos fell to arch-browed silence. At a hidden signal, the cart that
carried Cwmfen, Cygfa and Cunomar rolled
forward. The child's hands had been untied;
Caradoc had bound his son instead with an unbreakable oath not to bring disgrace on his
family and it had been accepted by the Praetorian
centurion who had charge of the proceedings.
Thus the three of the family stood upright, pale in
their linen shifts, their uncut hair lifting slightly
in the wind of their passing. They had the height
and colouring of Gauls, but were less clearly
cowed. The women, particularly, held themselves as queens, fixedly dignified. Word had passed that
they were perhaps to be spared execution but not
that they might also be spared slavery. In the
foremost rows of the crowd, the wealthier and
more daring of the senators' wives began privately
to bid for their services.

On the flat ground in front of Valerius, the
shade of Eburovic raised his shield to battle readiness.
On the plain, the cart containing Caradoc's
family reached the mid-point of the marked track.
At the plain's edge, the Praetorian centurion raised
a discreet hand. Valerius felt his heart lurch, as at
the start of battle. He hissed at the driver of the
grey horses. 'Get ready. When Marullus drops his
hand, move at a walk. Follow the tracks of the
others. If you value your life, don't let the horses
stop.'

The man nodded, his face a mask of fervent
concentration. In this place, death hung close, like
flies on a still day. A mistake in the emperor's procession
would meet with only one outcome; the
only question would be the manner of their dying.

The drumbeat matched the cadence of the
horses as they moved forward into walk. The cartwheels
turned, whispering greasily on their shafts.
The white mare was parade trained, and she
stepped out like a war horse - and on through the
shade of a man she had never known. Ban felt
the cold judgement of his father wash through
him, a man he had respected above all others.
Frost sheathed his heart. Only the willing warmth
of his horse stopped him from toppling out of the
saddle. As Valerius, he swore in Gaulish, Thracian
and Latin. None of these helped.

Dubornos said, 'He loved you,' and there were
no guards close enough to tear out his tongue.

The crowd held its breath. The cart carrying the
defeated rebel moved at a pace far slower than any
that had gone before it. Drowning in the appreciative, lingering silence, Julius Valerius, decurion of
the First Thracian Cavalry, rode by instinct, blindly.

'You've worked a long time for this; you should
enjoy it more.' Dubornos was ebullient. One
would not have thought him a man whose
death would begin a few short speeches away and
end with another dawn.

In Eceni, Valerius said, 'I will remind you of
that, come dusk.'

Ahead, the wagon bearing the rebel leader's
family reached its appointed place and turned.
The boy, Cunomar, raised his head and asked a
question of Cygfa; across the field Valerius saw it
and cursed the fact that the child had not been
given poppy to keep him pliable and silent.
Caradoc's cart reached the mid-point of the
processing pathway and curved back towards
the emperor. The sun-gold glare was blinding,
Claudius a hazed silhouette in its nucleus.
Agrippina was more easily seen, being less the
focus of the light. She had dressed all in white,
perfect as pearls, with her hair chastely hidden and
no jewellery but small clutches of seed pearls at her throat and ears.

Sweating, Valerius counted the paces in to the
tribunals.

Twenty. Ten. What would you have done if... A hushed mutter from the crowd surged to a soft
peak and subsided into silence. Five paces. A
single horn blew, devastatingly loud. Blessedly, the
horses ignored it. Two paces. Begin the halt ...
you had known that Breaca ...

Mithras. Father of Light. I need you.

The precision of their arrival shocked Valerius
into momentary clarity. Whoever had organized
this knew exactly what they were doing. The
shadows of the waiting crosses met in a tripartite
linkage of straight lines and bold blacks and the
centre point fell with mathematical exactitude
between the horses as the prisoners' cart slowed
for the line. Caradoc, who had been gold in the
sun, became muted in shadow.

Narcissus stood in the herald's place to the right
of the tribunal. He had the voice for it; when he
chose, he could project to the back of the waiting
silence as well as any actor.

'Halt before the person of your emperor! His
excellency Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero
Germanicus Britannicus commands it!'

As the words fell away, they halted. Legionary
horns sounded a deafening fanfare. Julius
Valerius, floundering officer of Rome, found
himself eye to eye with his emperor.

This close, Claudius' tremors were apparent. He
stood, his toga luminescent in the radiant light.
The palms embroidered on the tunic beneath
waved as if alive. He might have been their sole
focus of attention but Agrippina leaned forward.
Even seated, she was regal. No sane man could
imagine her earning her living diving as a slavegirl.
She studied the two prisoners on the cart as a
cook might study fresh fish at market. In a long
while, her gaze transferred, equally searching, to
Valerius.

'One is fair of hair, one red, one black,' she said
at length. They do not look of one tribe.'

In Latin, Caradoc said, 'My lady, we are not.'

The empress's exquisite brow rose to the height
of her hair line. Narcissus twitched. The crowd
could not hear them now. Fifty senators, straining
forward, were their only audience. They had
better breeding than the masses: they did not sigh
their surprise, but swayed as if they had.

Valerius was not so lost to reality that he could
no longer sense danger from his superiors. In
Eceni, he said, 'You might wish to consider the
future of your children before you speak again in
Latin. In this place, at this time, you do not know
it.

Caradoc inclined his head. He was no longer the
god, but neither was he a cowed and beaten
prisoner. His face was a mask of restrained,
intelligent dignity from which his eyes laughed.
Agrippina smiled into them, beautifully.

In the breathless silence that followed,
Narcissus, reading from a scroll, began to
announce the long list of the emperor's victories
over the rebellious tribes of Britannia. Under cover
of the noise, Claudius said, 'We have received
word from your dreamers. They do not agree to
our proposal. They will not lift their curse in
exchange for the lives of your wife and children.'

The ghosts already knew this: Macha, Eburovic,
the slave-boy Iccius. Surprisingly, each greeted the
news with gladness. Cwmfen and Cygfa, standing
within earshot in their wagon, quite clearly neither
knew nor were glad. It was possible they had not
known of the bargain at all. Valerius saw a sudden
movement and turned in time to see Cwmfen, who
had been silent, clamp a restraining hand on her
daughter's arm. A single harsh word in a foreign
tongue slid out across the plain, unnoticed by
most. It took Valerius some time to identify it as
Ordovician, straight from the battlefield, a
command to give ground immediately in the face
of the enemy. It could as easily have been meant
for Caradoc as Cygfa, or for both.

If Caradoc heard, he gave no sign. White-faced,
he opened his mouth to speak and snapped it shut
again while Valerius, remembering late his role,
made the fiction of translating the emperor's Latin
into the language of his childhood. He struggled
over one or two of the words, finding poor representations,
but then he could have spoken the
words of an infant's sleeping song and it would
not have mattered. All those within hearing understood
what had been said.

The time it took gave Caradoc a chance to
recover. He no longer smiled. In Eceni, in absolute
earnest, he said, 'I did the best I could. I have kept
my side of our oath.'

Translated, Claudius said, 'Indeed. Your friends
in the rebel territories, however, do not hold your
family's life as dearly as your own. They would
sacrifice them for you.'

'What?' 

That needed no translation. Behind them,
Narcissus reached a small climax in his descriptions
of martial valour: the triumphant entry of the
emperor into Camulodunum, borne on the backs
of elephants. The emperor smiled and raised a
hand to the grateful crowd.

When he could be heard again over the tumult,
Claudius said, 'If you die, I die. That is their exact
declaration. Not only do I die, but my death will
mirror yours exactly. I ask you now, and you
should know that your family's well-being hangs
on the truth of your answer, can they do this?'

Worlds stopped while Caradoc considered his
answer. They could have been alone, two men
facing death in different ways. On the rostrum,
Claudius the fool was replaced entirely
by Claudius the survivor, the excellent, scholarly
mind tuned, always, above the need to witness
pain in others, or to dominate, to the absolute,
unconditional need to preserve his own life.

Opposite him, Caradoc, too, had shed the
armours of pretence. Stripped to the bone, he
stared at Claudius, the inner workings of his mind
laid bare. If he had laughed at the emperor, he did
so no longer. If he had disdained his failures as a
man and a leader of men, he did not disdain his
mind, nor the manifest reach of his power. More
clearly even than in the prison, the core of him
blazed for all those close enough to see it.

On the wagon behind, Cwmfen and Cygfa
stood still as marble, and as white. At the
emperor's side, Agrippina tilted her head and ran
a single perfect nail down the side of her cheek.
Among the Senate, several men sat more upright.
The ghosts crowded close, supporting the warrior
in ways he would never know. Valerius, striving
wholly to be the instrument of his god, set his
teeth and prayed that he not be sick and that the
nightmare be taken from him.

'Can they do it?' asked Claudius again. 'I asked
you once before and you refused to answer. You
will tell me now. You have lived among them; you
must know it.'

Valerius translated, woodenly. The silence after
stretched the limits of endurance. If Caradoc could
have gone to his death without answering, he
would have done so, that much was clear. His
family's life depended on his answer but he had no
indication as to which way Claudius would lean.
Eventually, in Ordovician, the language of his own
childhood, he said, 'They will say that they can. I
do not believe it.'

The words drifted out into the golden air and
left their own echo. The emperor, the empress and
fifty men of the Senate, to whom they meant
nothing, turned to the decurion of the cavalry for
his translation. The dreamers of the Eceni signed
for Valerius, who had once been Ban, to interpret
accurately, using wards of binding that would
have stopped him dead as a child and forced him
to compliance. They bound him no longer. On the
contrary, they gave him the first indication of what
he could do, what his god required of him; whatever
the ghosts of his enemies so badly wanted, he
would do its opposite.

In a glorious moment of freedom and perfect
clarity, guided by his god and with the promise of
vengeance hot in his heart, Valerius translated the
two sentences as, 'Governor Scapula took ten days
dying, each one in pain. In that may be your
answer.'

Caradoc's gaze was grounded in stone.
Dubornos grunted as if punched in the chest and
clamped his teeth on his tongue. Cygfa, standing
beside her mother on the wagon, hissed a stream
of invective in withering Ordovician. The ghosts
fled, chittering.

Claudius turned to his decurion. 'You brought
us the news of our governor's death and yet did
not tell us this. Is it true?'

Valerius bowed, light-headed as if with wine or
the promise of combat. He balanced on the edge
of a precipice and a step the wrong way would see
him slowly dead. He said, 'Excellency, it is. Those
of my command who travelled with me can confirm
it. The legate of the Twentieth legion sent a
written report and my orders were not to speak
beyond that unless directly asked by yourself or
another in high command. I have not been so
asked. I believe the legate saw no point in disturbing
your excellency with unnecessary detail.'

'I see. We will consider this at a later date.'
Returning to Caradoc, the emperor said, 'You
knew before word reached me of Scapula's death
and now you know the detail before it is openly
told. How can you do this?'

'The gods may speak to any man in a time of
need.' It was Dubornos who said it, in Latin, out
of turn, in the presence of the emperor and interrupting
the man who was ostensibly his king.
Caradoc stared at him fixedly but said nothing.

The emperor nodded. More was at stake now
than protocol and he could not further condemn
one already sentenced to die. Valerius heard a man
he despised take risks to protect him and regretted
it. The ghosts addressed Dubornos in whispers
and he listened, nodding.

Speaking to Caradoc, Claudius said, 'Our life is
threatened. This cannot be allowed. Your family
will pay the price for your failure. You alone will
live as Vercingetorix did, held in confinement in
perpetuity as hostage for my life. The rest will die
over the coming days.'

Caradoc had recovered himself. In Latin, he cast
his voice beyond the emperor to reach the listening
Senate.

'And so Imperial Claudius is brought down by
the might of barbarian soothsayers and bards? I
had thought better of you than that. And that an
oath between kings was binding.'

It was a naked incitement to murder, the act of
a man who preferred any death to life. Valerius,
listening, heard his efforts unravel and saw for the
first time that the ghosts, perhaps, had known him
better than he had believed.

His mother was staring at him, her lips pursed
in thought. In his mind he said, I am not your instrument, now or ever. If Caradoc wishes to die, I will not be his saviour. She raised her brows and
smiled and the skin crawled on his spine.

On the podium of the tribunal, Caradoc's words
were absorbed with due regard by the emperor
and the men of the Senate but it was Agrippina
who responded first, waving amused dismissal.
She no longer smiled for Caradoc, but for
Claudius, whose death would put her sixteen-year-old
son on the throne. No-one doubted who
would rule in truth if that came to pass. Several on
the Senate saw the possibility stepping closer.

'The barbarian is bold,' she said. 'I have rarely
heard a man plead so eloquently for his own
death. Clearly he seeks to persuade you to its
opposite. The strength of his plea is proof of his
true desires. I say, instead, you should let him
have what he purports to crave. Kill him as
you have decreed. We will sacrifice to Mars Ultor
and again to Jupiter and see if his soothsayers are
a match for our gods.'

'And yet we may regret at leisure what we have
committed in haste.' Seated, with his chin on his
hands and the crown of laurels on his brow,
Claudius was another Augustus, epitome of
wisdom and arbiter of reasoned justice. 'This man
is a warrior and king of his people. It is long
known that among the barbarians, the king will
sacrifice himself for the greater good. It may be
that he knows the dreamers' power and believes
his death will aid them. For such a reason, he
would seek his own death.'

Narcissus, freedman and minister of state, completed
his announcements to the crowd. Entering
the conversation as if by right, he said, 'If there is
any such risk, it must not be taken. The man may
be spared without harm to your self or standing.'

The freedman set himself in opposition, once
again, to the empress. Those amongst the Senate,
tuned to the internecine warfare of the court,
saw a parting of ways and a need to take sides.
Nods of agreement began slowly and were taken
up, or not, by those with most or least to lose.

Agrippina frowned, decorously. One would
have had to be watching very closely to know if
she noted those who supported Narcissus amongst
the Senate. 'We have a victory procession,' she
said. 'Triumphal distinctions have been voted for
Ostorius Scapula. We do him and ourselves no
honour if we do not demonstrate the magnitude of
our victory. The crosses must not remain empty.'

Claudius nodded, pleasantly. 'The brother will
die, and the men who fought against us. The
people's desire to see blood will be assuaged and
yet, at the same time, they will be reminded that
their emperor is not without mercy. It is a good
combination. Thus did Scipio win the favour of
the people by his release of Syphax. Narcissus can
provide a speech for Caratacus in which he throws
himself on our mercy and we--'

'No.'

It was not said forcefully but, still, the Senate
jerked back as if struck. Two of the Urban Guard
stepped forward, their hands on their weapons.

Claudius directed his attention at Caradoc.
'Your life will be spared. You are not in a position
to argue.'

'Am I not?' The grey eyes scoured him. Valerius
knew that look. 'You have killed countless
hundreds of your enemies but have you ever yet
tried to keep a man alive against his will? To make
him eat and drink as much as a body requires to
live into long life? I promise you, our death, yours
and mine, will be as lengthy as flesh can make it.'

The emperor said, 'Once, in my audience room,
you implied doubt that your dreamers could reach
me. Did you then lie?'

'Yes. I believed it would protect my family. I
retract it. The governor's death is proof of their
powers. If they can reach him, guarded by the
legions, what is there to keep them from you?'

'I see.' The emperor spent full days in the law
courts, acting as judge. It showed in him now, as
he weighed actions, motives and consequences
towards judgement. 'You would go lying to
your own death but resort to truth only when your
family is threatened. Am I then to believe that you
value your brother's life above your own?'

'And those of the warriors, yes. I will not live to
see another man die in my stead.'

'How very noble.' The empress sneered. The
expression, if not the sound, was repeated here
and there amongst the ranks of the Senate. 'Let
them all die,' she said again. 'Xenophon and the
horse-guards together will see you come to no
harm from it. You are the emperor. You have
no need to be cowed by a barbarian.'

She spoke as a mother to a recalcitrant child,
demanding obedience. Breaths were drawn among
the Senate, audibly.

With excruciating slowness, Claudius turned.
He leaned a long moment on his elbow, the better
to look to his left. Fifty men of good birth and
high standing stared rigidly ahead for all the
aching time it took their emperor fully to face
the woman who was his niece and yet professed to
love him. When he spoke, his words were widely
spaced and each one a weapon.

'Nor by my wife,' he said distinctly.

The words fell one by one into dead air.
Narcissus smiled in triumph. Agrippina's eyes
blazed. She opened her mouth to speak and closed
it again, finding discretion at last. The men of the
Senate discovered new places to look that were
away from their emperor and his wife. Valerius
swayed and had to hold himself upright. His heart
hung lifeless in his chest. His mother smiled at him
and he turned away, tasting ashes on his tongue.
Caradoc and Dubornos, each thinking himself
unseen, made with the fingers of the left hand the
sign of thanks to the gods. Cwmfen wept silently
in her wagon. Cygfa, smiling her hate, bent to
Cunomar and kissed him.

Fringed around them all, the gathered ghosts of
the Eceni dead raised a cacophony of silent
celebration. A wren spiralled high in the clear sky,
singing.

IV.
AUTUMN AD 54.


XXIII.

Julius Valerius, decurion, disembarked from the
merchant ship Isis at the harbour of Ostia,
eighteen miles west of Rome. He arrived after
nightfall on the twenty-fifth day of September in
the fourteenth year of the reign of the Emperor
Claudius. That he did not fall to his knees and kiss
the sea-stained wood of the dock in thanks for a
safe landing was a testament both to the
benevolence of the one god and to the presence of
Severus, centurion of the Urban Guard, who had
come to escort him to the palace. Mithras
had never required the obsequities demanded by
other deities and the centurion had made it plain
from the moment of first greeting that time was
short and not to be wasted. Nevertheless, Valerius
stood for a moment holding the mooring rope and
let the land support him while the swimming
nausea of the sea receded.

He had never been good on water and an ocean
crossing made so soon after the equinoctial gales
was an invitation to hell for the duration of the
voyage, if not some considerable time thereafter.
Valerius had known as much when he first
received the message to take ship and travel to
Rome but the seal had been imperial and no
decurion who cared for his career would use poor
weather and the risk of shipwreck as an excuse to
refuse his emperor's summons. It might have been
more reasonable to claim that no master in his
right mind would set sail at such a time save that
the Isis rode at anchor on the Thames and the
decurion had been given three turnings of the tide
to set his affairs in order, find a fast horse, and
reach her. Because he cared more for his career
than for anything in his life except his god,
Valerius had been aboard before the second tide
was fully out, carrying a flagon of wine but no
food in order that the nightmare might pass
quickly, or seem to.

Standing on the solid planking of the dock with
his guts lurching to the rhythm of the sea, he was
grateful for the wine. More than the nausea, it
clouded his memory of Rome, so that he could
greet Severus with equanimity, recalling their time
served as part of Caligula's army on the Rhine
while avoiding any memory of the day they had
together shepherded a blighted victory procession
up the via Tiburtina or of the fiasco that came
afterwards on the broad plain in front of the
Praetorian camp.

Valerius had put over two years of dedicated
effort, of prayer, hard work and the judicious use
of wine, into banishing the ghosts that had
plagued him that day. He did not intend to let
them return simply because the emperor had need
of him in Rome.

Presently, his guts began to settle and his mind
to clear. Small details that he had missed on first
landing became plain. Severus was darkly cloaked
and he waited in that concealed part of the
harbour where both the quayside lamps and
the lighthouse failed to cast light. His horse bore
no marks that would identify it as a mount of the
Guard. The spare gelding whose rein he held was
outstanding in its ordinariness; a solid brown with
no splash of white on face or legs. Valerius had
ridden a horse like this once before in his early
days on the Rhine when it had been important to
blend in with the background and not be noticed.
Then, it had been the emperor who was
dangerous. Now, it seemed less likely to be so.

His legs had begun to trust the land. He stepped
away from the circle of light. The dafk held an
honesty that the orange blaze of the lighthouse
had not. Severus watched him carefully. The
man had been a solid soldier on the Rhine, hard
enough to be a good leader without crushing the
spirits of those who served under him. Age had
granted him dignity and white hair but no fresh
scars. None of this suggested he was a man who
might break his first and strongest oath to serve
his emperor in all things or die in the attempt. Still,
he was not branded for Mithras and so lacked the
added certainty of brotherhood, and the word in Britannia was that Agrippina owned the
Praetorians in their entirety. It was not safe to
assume that she did not own the Urban Guard as
well, or a substantial portion of it.

Valerius' orders had stated that he should come
unarmed. His dagger and his cavalry sword were
safely bound in his pack. On impulse, as he left the
ship, he had picked up a filleting knife owned by
the cabin boy and he held it now in the curved
palm of his right hand. Scale-slime slipped
between his fingers as he moved his grip to the
mid-point of the haft, ready to throw or to stab.
With a prayer to the god, he asked, 'Whom do you serve?'

'The emperor,' said Severus. 'To the grave and
beyond.' He did not say whose grave, but it was
not the centurion's death that was,daily rumoured
in Camulodunurn, nor his wife who was said to
rule the palace and the empire from her boudoir.

'Good. And I also.' Valerius reached down to
adjust his boot and let the knife slide unseen
through a gap between the planks of the dock. The
small splash of its falling was lost in the wash of
the tide. 'The sea is out of me,' he said. 'I am safe
to ride. Perhaps we should go?'

Severus nodded. 'With all speed,' he said. His
eyes marked the space through which the knife
had dropped.

They rode fast and hard and kept to the via
Ostiensis until they reached the main gate into
Rome where two men of the Guard let them
through as if expected. In the city, they took the
quieter streets, avoiding the main thoroughfares
with their parties of drunken youths and too many
wakeful eyes who might know a centurion by
name and ask questions concerning the identity of
the man he escorted.

Valerius had spent half a month in Rome on his
last, ill-fated visit and believed he had come to
know it. Riding through, he found it little changed and was surprised. The rumours in Britannia had
been of a city slumping to ruin along with its
emperor. It had been easy to imagine the insidious
beginnings of decay overlaying the memories of
slave-crowded streets and bright sun and constant
noise. He had forgotten the quieter Rome of night,
away from the taverns and whorehouses, where
citizens retired at dusk and rose at dawn and slept
at peace in between. Riding behind Severus, he
came to remember the reassuring calm of streets lit
by starlight where the only sound was the soft
hoofbeats of two horses and the smells were of
night and old buildings and not at all unpleasant
after the racking salt and sick of the voyage.

He did not recognize the palace until Severus
halted near a door in yet another long, high wall.
Coming to it in the dark and from the west, the
palace looked smaller and less imposing than he
remembered from his last visit. The gilded roof
shone no more than glazed tiles under the starlight
and the outer walls could have been yet another
anonymous villa. Valerius dismounted, feeling the
stiffness of the voyage cramp thighs that had been
three days without a horse. His pack weighed
more than he remembered. He unhitched it from
the saddle and hooked it over his shoulder.

Severus took his reins. 'Go to the door in the
wall on your right and knock twice. Wait until
someone comes. It may be a while.'

Valerius thought himself dismissed and was
turning away when the centurion gripped his
elbow, drawing him back. Up close, the officer's
eyes were bloodshot, like those of a man who has
slept too little. 'If he needs you so badly that he
has called you across the ocean, do as he asks,'
he said. 'He has few enough who will.'

'I took the oath as you did,' said Valerius. 'His
will is mine.'

'Good.' Severus grinned as a man grins before
battle who does not expect to survive it. 'Long
may it remain so.' He led the horses back into the
dark and Valerius was alone.

The door was a slaves' entrance, lacking adornment.
Standing before it in the quiet of the night,
Valerius felt currents of fear that were not his
alone. The place reeked of uncertainty and
betrayal and ghosts pressed close that had nothing
to do with the tribes of a foreign land and everything
to do with the desperation of a dying
emperor. No sane man would remain in it for
long.

Ghosts were no longer Valerius' concern and
fear had long ago ceased to be an enemy; wine
and the memory of the god had allowed him to
conquer both. Setting his mind to blankness, he
raised a hand to tap twice on the door and found
it already a hand's breadth open with a wide-eyed
boy peering through the gap. Valerius felt the hairs
of his scalp prickle a fresh warning; in the old
days, the palace  doors had not opened so silently.

The watch-boy lifted a small soapstone lamp and by its light, stared at the decurion's face as if
matching the features to a description; black,
straight hair cut to military length, fine, lean
features and eyes that will strip the skin from a
slave-boy who dares to stare too long. The boy
jerked back, leaving the door only just ajar so that
Valerius had to put his shoulder against it if he
wanted to follow. Inside, the lad had not waited
but was already leading the way down an unlit
corridor. It was not the behaviour expected of a
slave but this was a place where freed slaves ruled,
or it had been; nothing was done in the normal
way. Raising his pack, Valerius followed, warily.

The palace was overly warm. The slave-boy was
silent and scared and he led Valerius into emptiness,
but the walls thrilled to distant activity. For
a man who had spent the past decade at war, the
place reeked of ambush. Valerius hitched his pack
round and knew he could reach neither his dagger
nor his sword in time for either to be of use in an emergency. He thought of the filleting knife he had
dropped through the dock and cursed himself for
a short-sighted fool.

They stopped at a chamber far from the main
palace and large enough only to house a bed and
a small clothes chest. The walls were of plaster,
painted simply in pale aquatic green with sinuous fish near the ceiling and a floor of sand-grey tiles
so that he could have been standing twenty feet
beneath the surface of the ocean, staring up into the world of air and light. The effect would have
been better in daylight. At night, with a single
brazier and a rack of hanging lamps pushing a
poor glow into the dark, it was more like the river
just north of Camulodunum: muddily damp and
smelling of mould. The boy nodded and left. This
door, like the one before it, was well oiled.

The room was empty and remained so for some
considerable time. Valerius was hungry and alone. Neither of these was unusual and the latter was
perhaps, better than any of the alternatives. He
propped his pack in a corner, opened it and moved
his dagger to a place where he could reach it at
need, then, leaning back against the furthest wall
from the lamps, he set his mind blankly to wait.
Half a lifetime in the legions had taught him this
skill above all others; when he put his mind to it
Julius Valerius could outwait the Sphinx.

He had expected the freed slave Narcissus to
come, or Callistus, the paymaster; both were reputedly still loyal to Claudius. He got Xenophon, the Greek physician, which disturbed
him more than he would have chosen to admit. The man brought ghosts with him, simply by his presence. Valerius stood in the semi-dark and
strengthened the walls around his mind,
concentrating on the details of the physician's
features, excluding the possibility that others
might have joined them in the shadows.

There was much to see in Xenophon. Even
allowing for the uncertain light, the physician had
aged greatly in the years since their last meeting.
The man who had engineered the confrontation
between Valerius and his former compatriots had
been of vigorous middle-age, exuding vibrancy and intelligent humour. The man who stood in the
doorway to the underwater room was tired to
the point of exhaustion. His hair thinned back
from the crown of his head and that little left at the
margins, which had been a distinguished silver, was
a lank, translucent white. His skin was mottled with
age-spots and creased with care. His nose hooked
like a hawk's over a face too thin for its size.

'Have you eaten?' He spoke from the gloom
beyond the reach of the lamps. His voice had the
same cadences as that of Theophilus, who was still
field physician in the fortress at Camulodunum
and with whom he had undoubtedly enjoyed a
brisk exchange of letters these past two years.

'I haven't eaten since the ship.' Valerius roused
himself from his corner. He had not drunk since
then, either, which was bothering him more
although he chose not to say so. 'Is it safe to eat in
this place?'

The physician gazed at him a moment and then
nodded as if confirming a quite different question.
'For you, it probably is,' he said. 'Safer than
Britannia, from what I hear.'

That could only have come from Theophilus.
Valerius shrugged. 'Britannia is safe as long as you
don't venture into the western mountains in units
of less than a cohort's strength. And keep clear of
the Twentieth legion for the time being. They have
all the bad luck.' He grinned, sourly, daring the
physician to challenge him. When he did not,
Valerius said, 'You mentioned food?'

'Of course. My apologies.' Xenophon leaned
out of the door and signalled. An ill-fed lad with
lank brown hair and shy eyes entered, bringing a
tray of cold meats, cheeses and - blessed boy -a full jug of wine with two goblets. He bowed to
Xenophon, regarded the decurion with a disquieting,
professional curiosity and loitered for an
extra moment when dismissed.

'Philonikos, my apprentice,' said Xenophon,
when the lad had gone. 'I always swore I would
never take one, but have allowed myself to be
persuaded to make an exception.'

'And you regret having done so?' Valerius sat on
the clothes chest, balancing the tray of food on his
knees.

'No. He may do so, in time, but I will not. I
have discovered that it is good, in one's old age, to
believe that a lifetime's knowledge will not die
with its progenitor.'

'Indeed.' The wine, newly poured, was heavy
with age and good vintage. Valerius breathed in
the smell of it as a man breathes fresh air after too
long indoors. The first taste fortified the walls of
his mind as the solid certainty of the harbour at
Ostia had steadied his legs and his gut; the second
washed him clear of the need to talk nonsense. Settling his shoulders against an expanse of greenblue
plaster, he said, 'So now, perhaps, you might
tell me why I'm here?'

'Why do you think?'

'Not to play guessing games with you.'

'No. That would be unfair to us both.'

'And to Theophilus?' It was the soldier's way,
learned long ago, always to expose the enemy's
weapons to clear view.

'Perhaps.' The old man was tired and his guest
had just taken the only seat in the room.
Surprisingly, given his evident care for his dignity,
Xenophon sat on the floor. 'How is life in Britannia really?' he asked. 'I heard the new
governor has stopped the hangings amongst the
eastern tribes. That must ease the tension somewhat?'

He had not been summoned to discuss politics
either, but there was some refuge in doing so and
Valerius took it. 'Markedly. The Trinovantes and
their allies are delighted. In the west, he has sent
cohort after cohort of the Second and the
Twentieth to their destruction, which nicely
bolsters the morale of the Silures and their allies among the Ordovices and the warriors of Mona,
while in the north he lets Venutios raise the spears
of the northern Brigantes and threaten
Cartimandua's hold on those who remain. If our
governor believes the emperor requires him to
keep the tribes happy, to give them succour and
support their belief that they will drive us
ultimately from the province, then, yes, he is
succeeding beyond his wildest dreams.'

'You would prefer it if he returned to the
constant hatred that existed under Scapula? You
know what the tribes think of you and how many
dreamers have sworn to see you dead?'

'Of course.' In that one short sentence, they
moved to a new, more personal, level. It was not
unexpected, simply poorly timed; before the wine
arrived, it might have been more damaging.
Valerius drank deeply, and, smiling, met the
physician's eye. 'Who cares if they hate, as long as 
they fear?'

Xenophon blanched. 'Caligula used to say that.'

'I know.' The cheeses were made of goat's milk,
whitely crumbling. They matched well with the
wine. Valerius broke one in half and ate it
delicately. 'In this, as in many things, he was
right.'

There was no possible answer to that.
Xenophon knew as well as any man exactly the
disdain in which Valerius had once held Caligula.
They sat for a while in silence, each reviewing his
weapons.

Xenophon pursed his lips and pressed the tips of
his fingers to the bridge of his nose, thinking.
Valerius watched him make a decision and reject it
twice before he lowered his hands and drew a
strained breath to speak.

'Theophilus tells me you were a changed man
when you returned from Rome two years ago; that
you drank to excess, of wine and not ale; that in
the gap between Scapula's death and the appointment
of the new governor, you slaughtered the
natives unchecked, hanging men, women and
children for "crimes against the emperor" - real or
imagined - until, even more than before, your
name became a curse in tribes from the east coast
to the west; that you ran riot through your own
ranks, killing an actuary of another wing so that
the men threatened mutiny and only the intervention
of their prefect kept you safe. Is it true?'

Valerius sat very still. Even after his return from
Rome, he had believed Theophilus an ally. The
physician had nursed him through the bull-dreaming
and knew the measure of his encounter
with the god. He had seen the ghosts after the
decurion's return, too, having raised them once
with an excessive dose of poppy given to dull the
pain while he stitched a spear-wound in Valerius'
thigh. The consequent ravings had not been
dignified but they were at least contained within
the private room of the hospital at Camulodunum.
It was not something of which they spoke but
Valerius had refused the drug ever after and
Theophilus had not pressed it on him, even ,when
cauterizing an infected sword-cut. There had been
nights later when he had offered the same private
room and the company of his presence to a man
who had urgent need of both. At the time, Valerius
had been grateful to have someone with whom he
could share the long nights when neither wine nor
hard work had kept the walls between the worlds
intact. Now, listening to Xenophon speaking in
ways designed explicitly to raise the dead, he
wondered if the overdose of poppy had not been
so accidental, if all of this had been planned.

Valerius drained his beaker of wine and poured
another. He would have liked the succour of
divine instruction but Mithras came to him only
patchily these days and hardly ever when he was
in company. He had taken part in initiations of
over a hundred acolytes since his first branding; at
different times, he had cut the wrist-cords, had lit
the lamps, had led the chanting. He had seen
countless men come to the god and seen the
change in them, not just in the cellar but on
the battlefield and the training grounds. They
shone with the touch of the deity and each of them
believed that Valerius shared that. Theophilus
knew the truth and so he must assume Xenophon
knew it too; that the visit of the god was a rare
thing, sustained through the barren years by hope
and faith and a mess of incoherent dreams.

The knowledge of this had never yet stopped
him from striving to reach the Sun and all that it
stood for. Doing so now, he was surprised before
he was grateful when his view of Xenophon
wavered and the other worlds pressed in. The red
roan bull came first, as it had done ever since he
had seen it in the flesh. Valerius met it as an old
friend - his only true friend - and, with its
strength, he built the square-blocked altar to the
god, adding the incense and the memory of brand
smoke to make it real. On the sea-green plaster
behind Xenophon's head, he painted an image of
the capped youth who committed slaughter at the
behest of older, angrier gods. The roan bull died,
forced to kneeling, and the god wept. Tears mixed
with the blood and leaked onto the sandstone
floor. The gathered ghosts claimed them for their
own.

Valerius stared at his god and his god stared
back. The ancient and recent dead filled the space
between them. Xenophon waited in silence. At
some time when the distraction was greatest, he
moved across the floor to sit at Valerius' side. The
decurion felt a lean, withered hand test his forehead
for heat and another lift his wrist for a pulse.
A voice from outside time asked, 'What do you
see?'

'Nothing.' He would not speak of it again to
anyone.

'Are you blind then?'

'No.' Valerius cupped his palms over his eyes.
Sometimes the blackness worked, sometimes it
made things worse. This time, it gave him space to
gather the words he had half-prepared, expecting
such an attack as this. When he could speak with
a steady voice, he said, 'Theophilus is a physician.
He views the world through different eyes from
those of us who are required to maintain discipline
amongst fighting men. Umbricius attacked me
openly; I killed him in self-defence. It was
witnessed by my troop and his. No-one disputes
it.'

'And the rest? The slaughter of the natives? The
hangings? The villages razed and their children
burned?'

It was too much and too deliberate. Blessedly,
the anger came; not the surging, vicious fury that
had killed Umbricius, but enough. It worked as
nothing else ever did to lessen the haunting. In the
consuming cold of his rage, the screaming dead
screamed less. Macha, mother to Ban, faded from
sight as if she had never been.

A single cold, clear voice remained, of a man
still alive who had once echoed the voice and
features of the god. What would you have done
if... ? Only with extremes of wine could that
voice be made to stop, but Valerius had learned,
over time, to think past it. He dropped his hands
from his eyes and was gratified to see Xenophon
flinch from what could be read in his face. He
remembered the knife in his pack and saw the
possibility of death strike the physician. He smiled
and knew what it did to the other man's fear.

With deliberate clarity, Valerius said, 'Killing is
what war is about. If you don't like it, you have
the ear of the only man who can change it. Tell
Claudius to pull his legions out of Britannia and
the killing will end. Until then, we have to win or
we die. I do not intend to die, but if I was brought
here to face the executioner, you should know that
my death will not end the war.'

'I have never believed it would.'

Xenophon was not truly afraid of him, which
was a mistake. In the renewed emptiness of the
room, the possibility of murder hung between
them. Valerius set his goblet down and rested back
against the wall, his fingers laced behind his head.
He was pleased with the steadiness of his hands; it
was not always so. 'You still haven't told me why
I'm here,' he said. 'I don't believe it was to quibble
over the death of a Gaulish actuary.'

In that single sentence, a thousand deaths were
reduced to a minor point of law and Roman order
was restored. With evident regret, Xenophon
moved back to sit at his place against the opposite
wall. When he spoke, it was of other things.

'You're right, of course. The emperor would not
pay what he did to bring you here to discuss the
death of a Gaul, although your reasons for killing
him may have a bearing on the outcome of your
task. Military discipline matters more to some
than others, particularly here and now '

The physician drifted to silence, staring into the
reflective surface of his own wine, choosing his
phrases for best effect. 'If we leave aside the bullslayer
and remain in the temporal world, to whom
do you, as an officer of the cavalry, owe your
ultimate loyalty?' he asked. 'Whose order will
you obey without question, to its fulfilment or
your own death, whichever comes first?'

Valerius said, 'The emperor's. That is,
Claudius.' It mattered now, to state a name.

'And if that emperor is slain, then are you loyal
to his successor, or to the one to whom you gave
your oath?' 

Thus did they quietly enter the realms of
treason. Men had died over days for far less.
Valerius dropped his eyes. He, too, studied his
own floating reflection for the answer. It was not
something to which he had given serious thought,
although perhaps he should have done. I serve my
emperor, in life and to death.

'The emperor commands the armies, whomsoever
he may be,' he said presently. 'The loyalty
is to the position, not the man. In absolute terms,
my allegiance is to my prefect, through him to my
governor and so to the emperor. But Britannia is
not close to Rome and the winter is almost upon
us. If an order failed to reach the governor before
spring, he would act on Claudius' last command
and amend it as his powers and the situation
required. I would take my orders from him.'

'What if, hypothetically speaking, the emperor Claudius
 were to give you a direct order in
person and you were not to return to Britannia
before spring? There would be no chain of
command to cushion your choices.'

'No. I could see that.' Valerius set the tray of
food carefully on the floor. Always before, action
and the promise of action had brought him back
to himself. It did so now. Thinking aloud, he said,
'May I take it that the order I might be given
would be contradicted by the next emperor, were
he to find out what it was?'

'You may. If you are careful, he will never find
out and you can return to your unit a far richer
man. If you are careless--'

'-then I will die. That is always the case. The
god knows I have been careful so far.' Danger
sparked lightly along Valerius' spine, welcome as a
lover's touch. 'Is it fair to assume that you are
empowered to give me this order?'

'Yes. I have it here, written by Claudius in his
own hand and sealed before witnesses.' The scroll
the physician drew from his sleeve was a small
one, sealed with the imprint of an elephant, the
emperor's personal and private seal, used only in
relation to Britannia. The order recalling Valerius
to Rome had borne exactly that image.

Xenophon held it loosely, as he might a
captured finch, soon to be released. With unusual
gravity, he said, 'I can give you the scroll, but may
not do so unless you swear beforehand on your
god and your soldier's oath that you will accept in
its fullness the order contained herein, that you
will carry it out to the last,breath of your life or
die in the attempt. This is for your own protection.
Without that stipulation, if you refused, you
would have to die.'

'Obviously. In a matter of this secrecy, you
could not risk that I might speak of it beyond here.
Do you know the nature of the command that I
am given?'

'I do.'

Valerius was standing now, his hands damp. His
heart careened in his chest, rebounding off the
bars of his ribs. The room had emptied, utterly. In
place of the multitudes, he felt the distant presence
of the god, drifting like old incense, promising
victory. 'In my place, would you accept this?' he
asked. 'Would you give your oath to carry it out?'

'Willingly and without question.'

'Thank you.' Valerius drank the last of the wine.
The decision was no decision, as Xenophon must
have known it would be. The lure of danger was
too great and, greater than that, the god was with
him in a way he had not been these last two years.
Savouring the sweetness of it, he said, 'In that
case, in Mithras' name, on his honour and my
own, by my pledge on his altar and by my oath to
the emperor, I accept in its fullness Claudius'
order, whatever it may be. His will is mine, to
death and beyond.'

XXIV.

Cwmfen of the Ordovices, prisoner-under-amnesty
to the Emperor Claudius, gave birth at
dusk five days after the autumn equinox in the
third year of her captivity, that being also
the fourteenth year of the reign of the man by
whose whim and under whose protection she
lived. The child was a boy, son to Caradoc, full
brother to Cygfa and half-brother to Cunomar
who was no longer his father's only son.

The delivery was prolonged and painful.
Outwardly, the warrior of the Ordovices had
changed little since her capture, but each passing
month of the emperor's hospitality had softened
the trained iron of her muscle until, when her time
came, she was no more fit for the bearing of
children than any other of Rome's women.

It was the first childbirth Cunomar had ever
seen; when his mother had given birth to Graine,
she had done so with only the dreamers to attend
her and he had seen the infant only afterwards,
when the blood and the screaming were done. He
did not believe his mother had screamed. He was
sure he would have heard her, however far away
she went. Since coming to Rome, he had heard the
sounds of birthing often enough to know it was
different here. The walls of the second floor apartment
in which they lived were so thin that he
might have been in the same room as their neighbours
on either side, above, and below, and what
noise did not come in from them radiated across
from the opposite side of the street and those
behind. The fat Latin woman whose apartment
shared their stairway had, as far as he could tell, a
child every year and shot them out as a hen lays
eggs, but the freed slave-woman downstairs and
the silversmith's woman and the sullen, silent one
who lived alone and the Latin woman said was
a whore had each passed through long, painful
births in the last two years, all of them noisily.

Cwmfen screamed and was ashamed of it.
Cunomar could see that. In order that he would
not shame her further by witnessing it, he spent
the day fetching water. In the early morning, he
took the half-dozen buckets they owned and filled
them one at a time from the sunken cistern on the
ground floor that served their apartment and four
others near it. Carrying water was always his job
and on most days he resented it, as he resented all
things Roman. In his world, the one the gods had
made, water was a gift from Nemain, flowing in
streams and rivers, or from Manannan when he
made the endless sea. One gave thanks to the god
and used it with care, but it never ran dry. In
Rome, water came in aqueducts or underground
pipes and was delivered directly to the houses of
the rich and the public baths. For those, like
Cunomar's family, who lived in penury and not
near a baths, there were wells and cisterns, but
they were privately owned and if one did not have
to pay for the water one had to carry it. Either
way, it became another symbol of drudgery and
separation from the gods.

On this day, uniquely, the slow walk up the
stairs with water slopping onto his legs was a
blessed relief and Cunomar repeated it frequently,
even when the water was not truly needed. In the
afternoon, when the buckets were all still full, he
borrowed a pair of sewn goatskins from the fat
Latin woman and carried them down the long hill
to the public baths and the cracked fountain that
served the houses and market stalls that surrounded
them. He craved sunlight by then, and
had the excuse that he had three newly made belts
to deliver to the merchant who sold them for him.
The money he made scarcely paid for the leather,
but his tool work was improving and he could
make three or four belts in a day and, from those,
earn enough to buy bread and ale, or a jointed
hare, or, better than these, a sea-fish freshly caught
and brought in from Ostia.

It had taken some time for the family to find
ways to survive. In the early days after their
release, they had been novelties, and Caradoc
especially had been in demand to appear at supper
with senators and consuls and those who hoped to
become so, who needed to demonstrate their
support of Claudius and saw in the pardoned
captive a means subtly to do so.

The serpent-spear brooch that he wore had been
borrowed - for a fee - and replicated and became,
for a while, the symbol of support for the emperor
before the fad passed and something less barbaric
replaced it. The brooch had been returned by the
silversmith who copied it, who had stayed for the
afternoon to discuss its making and the creation of
other pieces, similar but not the same. It had
seemed that something might come of that to earn
an income, but the silversmith had died of eating
bad pork and no others had come in his stead.
Caradoc's appearances had not been paid;
but each time a fresh set of clothes had been provided,
each outdoing the last in ostentation and
poor taste, and these had been sold later to feed
the family for a while and perhaps pay for firewood
as well. Later, as the invitations dwindled,
they had found that Dubornos' skills were most
marketable. There was little call for a trained
warrior, particularly not one damaged for life by
the attentions of the emperor's horse-guard, but a
storyteller with a barbarian accent was welcome
and particularly so if he were a healer. Xenophon
had helped in this, supplying herbs and bland
bases for ointments and salves, and they had lived
from these through the first winter.

In spring, inactivity had driven the others to
action as a way to keep from going mad. After
several false starts, they had found that
Ordovician leatherwork was valued even if those
buying it could not decipher the symbols burned
and worked into the hides. Cygfa had come out of
herself a little and made a belt, spending days on
the tooling. It had sold quickly and the rest had
learned from her. It was not warriors' work but
better than the alternatives. They made belts and
pouches and scabbards for the weapons they
themselves were forbidden to wear and, once, a
consignment of boots that they found later,
appallingly, was destined for the cavalry fighting
in Britannia.

Standing in the raw September sunshine,
Cunomar weighed the copper coins he had been
given for the belts and decided that, today of all
days, his father needed ale more than anything,
and that Cwmfen would probably appreciate it
when the babe was out. He bought a flagon and
set it in the water of the fountain to chill for a
while before he carried it back, hoping the whole
mess might be over by the time he returned.

It was half over, which was better than nothing.
When he had left, Dubornos had said he could feel
the first arc of the crown against his searching
fingers. When Cunomar slipped into the room and
took his place sitting in the far corner, he had
almost the whole head.

Experience of foalings and lambings in the time
before Rome told Cunomar that the worse part
was the shoulders and that a head alone was not
enough, but this babe had a narrow chest and the
shoulders came as the last of the sun tipped over
the edge of the rooftops to the west so that the
infant emerged soon after into lamplight and
the arms of his father. He was bald and wrinkled
and red and ugly but Cunomar had learned that
was to be expected and did not remark on it.

For Roman propriety, they named him Gaius
Caratacus. Amongst the family, he was to be Math
of the Ordovices, a name his father had used in his
youth and, for his parents if not for Cunomar,
sang of freedom. In accordance with what little of
his heritage it was possible to recreate, Dubornos
spoke the words of Briga's welcome while
Caradoc carried the child two flights downstairs
to the small plot of their vegetable garden and
with Cygfa and Cunomar as witnesses, showed
him to the night sky, to the earth and to water, and
then returned him to his mother who was already
asleep. The child had wide, pale eyes and after the
first squalls of birth viewed them all in shocked
silence, as if he had come expecting a roundhouse
and a world at war and had prepared no response
for the sight of four walls and a city that pretended
peace.

Afterwards, the ale was as welcome as
Cunomar had hoped it might be. They built a
small fire, although it was not truly cold, and sat
with it for a while in silence, enjoying the warmth
of the flames and the bite of the drink and the
quiet of the evening before retiring to sleep.

Cunomar worried constantly about his father,
who worried constantly about all of them. Each
did his best not to let it show. The crowded living
of the apartment had demonstrated early that
none of them could afford to give way to petty
resentments if all were to keep their souls and
sanities intact. Cunomar lay awake most nights
reminding himself that Rome was the enemy, not
Cygfa or Dubornos or Cwmfen or, gods forbid, his
father. If it was hard for him not to descend into
petty squabbles, how much harder for Caradoc,
who shouldered the burden of care for the family
while still the subject of talk wherever he went? If
Cunomar found the limitations of life in the apartment
drove him to distraction, how could he show
it when his father bore for life the stigma of
the pardoned captive and the damage of his
imprisonment?

The physical scars were most obvious if not
necessarily the most damaging. Despite
Xenophon's best efforts, neither Caradoc's ruined
shoulder nor the shackle-sores on both Dubornos
and Caradoc had healed fully. The sores
festered and neither man had recovered full use of
his wrists and hands afterwards. Caradoc's
wounds were worse, Cunomar thought, because
he had been bound more tightly and because he
had fought against the shackles that day in the
blood-red room when the emperor had used
Cunomar as a lever in an effort to extract the
words he wanted from his enemy. It was then, too,
that the strings of his shoulder had been ripped
apart and Xenophon had said at the outset that
the warrior would never recover full use of that
arm. 

Knowing that, Cunomar went to lengths both
to support Caradoc and to hide that he was doing
so. In little ways, he did what he could to save him
from having to use his hands for delicate tasks. He
worked the finest tooling on the leather, he
chopped wood for kindling, because it was hard
for Caradoc to wield an axe left-handed and his
right arm did not have the power to split logs into
splinters. He learned to fillet fish and never
brought one home but its guts were already gon.
Caradoc had spent a large part of his life aboard
ship in his youth in the days when he was Math
and the few years after when he abandoned the
pretence and was known clearly as Caradoc,
renegade son of the Sun Hound. He had acquired
a taste for sea-fish then and never lost it. There
was a possibility that he might have preferred fish
even to ale as a treat for the evening.

Cunomar was lying awake with his mind drifting from ale to fish to the memory of how
carefully his father had grasped the new child, as
if afraid he might damage it, when Cygfa appeared ,
in the doorway.

Stiffly, unwillingly, she said, 'Dubornos, can you
come? Cwmfen's bleeding. I can't make it stop '

It was too dark to see. Cygfa had always had
the eyes of a cat. Cunomar heard Dubornos'
muffled answer and the sound of his feet on the
floor; the singer must have been awake already, to
respond so quickly. Rising, Cunomar found the
doorway by habit and then saw his way to
the front room by the poor light of the lamps still
lit within. By those, also, he saw how still Cwmfen
was lying on the bed and the spread of dark blood
on the floor. Ahead of him, Dubornos grasped Cygfa's arm.

'We need help with this. Go to Xenophon at the
palace. Ask for his ergot with my sincere apologies
for not accepting it when he first offered.' His eyes
shifted past her to the doorway and he said, 'Take
Cunomar. It's not safe for you to be out at night
on your own.'

Cygfa opened her mouth and closed it again. Of
them all, she was the one who had adjusted least
well to life in Rome. She had no visible scars and
had not, besides the examination by Xenophon in
the emperor's quarters, been physically assaulted
in any way. Nevertheless, that examination, and
the fact that she had passed to womanhood
and not yet taken her long-nights, had been
enough to cut her off from the world and her family
with it. For the whole of the first year, she had
spoken to no-one but her mother and then only at
times of absolute necessity. The making of the
belts had been a turning point and she had begun
after that to speak to her father and brother, seeming
at times almost recovered. With Cunomar particularly, she had begun to develop a true
friendship so that he had begun to understand at last what it meant to have a sister and to rejoice
in it.

Dubornos was different. Cygfa loathed
Xenophon with a cold, consuming passion and
Dubornos was his friend. Caradoc was his friend
too, but he was her father and could not be held
at fault. In any case, he had not been present in the
audience room on the night of their arrival.
Dubornos, who had been present, had not been
forgiven, nor, perhaps, ever could be.

Cunomar had been sure that his sister had loved
the singer once. Certainly she had yearned for him
and her withdrawal from him in the messy,
tangled winter after their reprieve had the brittle
feeling of one whose offer of love has been
rejected, or honour besmirched. His closeness to
Xenophon, Cunomar thought, gave her an excuse
to behave the way she did, but it was not the first
reason.

Whatever the cause, Dubornos had felt it and
been hurt. Over the past two years, he had made
every effort to show her respect, to treat her
exactly as he treated her mother, as a warrior and
an adult. Faced with her unyielding resistance, he
had, in the end, become as formal with her as she
was with him until they barely spoke from one
month's end to the next.

Only now, with Cwmfen's life in danger, had
Dubornos' careful formality slipped, and then
badly. To imply that the streets of Rome were
more dangerous for her than they were for
Cunomar was tactless at best. Cygfa was a proven
warrior with eight kills to her credit. Moreover,
for the past two years, she had worked to keep
herself as fit as she had ever been in the days when
they were free. The streets were safer by far for her
than for Cunomar who had killed no-one and to
suggest otherwise was an insult. She stood in the
hallway and it was quite clear to all of them that
the only reason she had not struck Dubornos was
her mother's need for him.

In the lamplight, Cunomar sought her eyes and,
meeting them, sent a silent plea that she let go of
the insult and do as she was asked. If Dubornos
wanted them gone, it was for a reason and there
was nothing to be gained by pulling holes in his
logic. The new friendship between them worked.
Before, she would have ignored him. Now,
delighted, he saw her waver and change her
mind. Nodding, she said, 'What are you going
to do?'

Dubornos was already halfway into the room.
'Pray,' he said. 'And see if I can find where she's
bleeding and stop it.'

'It's deep inside. She can feel it. Ask her; she's
still with us.' The girl turned . and squeezed
Cunomar's arm. 'I'll get my cloak. You should
bring yours. It's not cold now, but it will be later
when we've walked to the palace.'

It could take half the night to get there, they
both knew that, and they might not be able to find
someone who would wake Xenophon for them.
Needing not to leave yet, Cunomar said, 'Can you
get it for me? It's on the bed. I was using it as an
extra blanket.' His voice was breaking. It came
out low and gruff, deeper than his father's. He
coughed and felt the heat rise in his face. Cygfa
squeezed his arm again and walked away into the
dark.

Left alone, Cunomar turned his full attention on
Caradoc. Cwmfen was not his mother and,
whereas he would have been sad if she died, a lot
of that sadness would have been because he knew
what she meant to his father. Caradoc had not yet
left the birthing room. He was naked to the waist.
Old battle scars coursed in tired rivulets along his
chest, back and arms. He held his newest son to
his good shoulder, his lips pressed to the infant's
head. The hands that held him were cramped,
with the fingers half shut as they always were at
night when Caradoc was tired, but they still held
him with the care they had done at his birth, and
would do for the rest of his life, Cunomar was
sure of it. The child had fed and was quiet, his
breath a soft measure of life in a room that so
obviously harboured death.

Dubornos was already kneeling by the bed.
Cwmfen opened her eyes but could not hold them
so. The singer felt her pulse and her forehead.
From the doorway, Cunomar could see the latter
was clammily wet.

'She has a fever,' said Caradoc woodenly.

Dubornos said, 'It's not as bad as it looks. Half
of this is the exhaustion of childbirth.' It may have
been true. A bucket of water sat by the bed with a
cloth over the rim. The singer laid a damp compress
across Cwmfen's brow. Water leaked into
her hair, diluting the sweat. Caradoc stood still as
stone at the bedside. Dubornos looked up. 'This is
not your fault.'

'No? I think I could be held at least half to
blame.' It was said without humour where once
irony would have lightened it. Cunomar heard the
change and his heart ached at the sound of it.

Dubornos moved to the foot of the bed. The
concealing sheets, brought in after the birth, had
long since been stained and cast aside. He knelt,
seeking the source of the steady trickle of blood. It
was not yet a flood; that much was good.
Somewhere outside, a detail of armed men
marched through the claustrophobic streets. The
stamp of two dozen feet rocked the walls of the
apartment. That, too, was something to which
Cunomar had not and would not become
accustomed: the nightly arrests of the innocent
and their disappearance thereafter. They had
grown more frequent of late. Perhaps with good
reason, Claudius was becoming increasingly
paranoid, and more men were required to die for
his safety. An officer called the halt, his voice so
close he could have been in the room.

Dubornos shuddered. He, too, hated the
legionaries. 'Rome is to blame,' he said. 'Or
Claudius, or Breaca's godforsaken brother, but not
us. Or, if you are to blame, I am equally so. She
was in my care when we were taken.'

'Ha.' Cwmfen twitched under his probing
fingers. The husk of her voice said, 'You are
become Roman, Dubornos. I am a warrior. I live
under no-one's care.'

Caradoc knelt and took her hand loosely in his
own. 'You are the finest of warriors. You will pass
this test as you passed all the others.'

'Of course.' From the doorway, Cunomar could
see the love as she smiled into his eyes and felt, as he always did, the odd mix of grief and displaced
envy that twisted his gut whenever he saw
Cwmfen taking the place that was rightfully his mother's.

Ashamed, he turned away, that he might not be
seen. Cygfa appeared at his side and draped his
cloak over his shoulders. 'Here,' she said. 'It was
under the bed and I couldn't find it.' Outside, in the streets, men of the Guard were running at the
order of their officer.

Cunomar drew his cloak up round his shoulders,m
and stopped, feeling the coarse weave and the old
musty smell that marked it as his old cloak, the
one he had cast aside at midsummer when
the leather-trader had given him an extra coin for his work and he had bought a new cloak with it. Cygfa had been there to help him pick it. She had stitched the care-marks of the Ordovices along the hem as protection; she should have remembered it.
A day's worth of resentments spilled over in
Cunomar. Throwing the cloak on the floor, he 
said, 'This is old and it smells. The new one's on the bed under the blanket where I--'

He stopped, frozen. From a street full of armed men, someone had entered the apartment block. Light feet ran up two flights of stairs and stopped at their door. Cygfa, who had more courage than
he could begin to imagine, stepped past him to
open it.

'Good evening.' Philonikos, apprentice to Xenophon, hesitated on the landing. Dubornos had always said the lad was Hermes come to earth, inadequately fed. His hair was a dusky brown, heading to gold and too straight to be truly beautiful, and his features were pinched and
hollow-cheeked, as if his mother had starved him
in childhood and the habit had continued beyond her care. His long, artist's fingers were already
swollen round the joints, the product of hours
spent grinding pastes in a pestle.

Xenophon had found the boy in the library
reading medical texts written by Largus, the emperor's former physician, an act at once of folly and astonishing precocity. They had made an
agreement soon after: Philonikos would cease to
study texts by those whose writing Xenophon
deemed unworthy, and in return he would be considered for an apprenticeship. The consideration
period was a fiction; there had never been any
doubt as to the youth's application or ability. He was obsessive in his care of the sick and gifted in his diagnoses and healing. For the past eighteen
months, Cunomar had watched with something close to envy as the other youth trailed after
Xenophon in the way a stray cur follows the one who feeds it, listening always, speaking rarely and
learning a trade that would keep him rich and healthy long into old age as it had done
Xenophon. Then that same youth was here, in the
doorway, and that could only be on his master's
orders.

The boy was a wraith, unable to cross thresholds
uninvited. His eyes were widely pale, like a
monkey's. His shadow fell like a handful of twigs
across the floor slats, cast by half a dozen lamps.
Of all the adults, Dubornos had had most dealings
with him. The singer stood up, squeezing blood
from his hands. He spoke in the old-fashioned
Greek with which the lad was most comfortable
and all of them now understood.

'Philonikos, be welcome and enter, please.
Xenophon told me he was not a dreamer. It
appears he was being unnecessarily modest.'

The physician's apprentice hovered yet in the
doorway, his gaze switching from Cwmfen on
the bed to the sleeping, silent infant at Caradoc's
shoulder. 'Is she sick?' he asked. 'Did the babe
come out badly?'

Cunomar slid past him into the room. 'I haven't
asked him for the ergot,' he said. 'Should I?'

Ergot, it seemed, had only one use in the
post-partum woman. Philonikos was transformed.
'She's bleeding?' In two steps, he had crossed the
room and knelt where Dubornos had lately been,
squinting in the inadequate light.

'It's not too bad. She will live if she doesn't get
milk fever but we should pack her to be sure the
bleeding doesn't start again,' he said. 'I can't
go back to the palace. They've sealed it off.
Largus will have ergot but he's across in the
Aventine; we won't get to him in time. We need
cold water and linen, torn into strips. This will
do.'

He picked up a clean sheet, saved for the first
day after birth and not yet befouled, and threw it
to Cunomar, who caught it without thinking and
began to tear, his mind unwillingly dragged to the
world outside. 'Why is the palace sealed off ?' he
asked. And then, because the adults all stood in
silence and he realized he did not want to know
the answer, he asked, 'Why did Xenophon send
you here now if not to tend Cwmfen?'

Philonikos looked at Caradoc for permission to
speak and, after a moment, received it. He had his
message by heart and delivered it without
emotion. 'Claudius is under siege,' he said. 'He
may already be dying - poisoned by Agrippina -but if not, it will come within the next half-month.
They will blame Xenophon although he has done
his best to prevent it. Agrippina has control of the
palace. She will put it about that the emperor is ill
and we should pray for him. Her astrologers will
wait until their stars are more fair and then, when
the time is right, she will set Nero on the throne
and rule through him. From that moment, you are
not safe here. She hates you. In the wave of deaths,
of Narcissus and Callon and all those others who
have opposed her, or angered her, or witnessed her
humiliation at the hands of Claudius, yours will be
one of the many that no-one notes.'

The speech had Xenophon's cadence, if not his
warmth and passion. Cunomar watched Cygfa
step to her mother's side. For a long time, she had
simply ignored Philonikos, staring through him as
if he did not exist. Then, he had not been a
physician with the skills that might save her
mother's life. There was defiance and guilt and a
more basic need to erase the past when she said,
'The people love Claudius as much as they despise
Agrippina. If we let out that the emperor is
threatened by her, they'll storm the palace, surely?'

If Philonikos understood the change in Cygfa,
he did not let it show. He was absorbed in his care
for her mother. Already Cwmfen's bleeding had
lessened. He reached for her wrist, his head bent
over the better to feel the pulse. 'You can't,' he
said absently. 'The guards won't let you.'

Sharply, Caradoc said, 'What guards? The ones
outside?'

There had been silence after the marching and
the shouted orders and the short burst of men
running to station. Sniffing the air, Cunomar
smelled burning pitch, which meant torches,
which meant, in turn, there would be fire. It
should not have surprised him; too many of the
recent executions had been covered by convenient
fires. He watched realization take shape on the
faces of his father and Dubornos, even on Cwmfen
on the bed, and saw them all turn to him and try
to disguise it.

An old, familiar nausea returned. 'They've come
for us,' he said. He had always known it would
happen.

'Yes, but not to arrest you, to help. They come
on Claudius' orders and are still loyal to him. That
doesn't mean they'll let you raise a riot in Rome
on their watch, though.' Philonikos looked up.
'The bleeding will stop soon. It was not as bad as
it looked. Can someone get Cwmfen some clean
water, perhaps with a little honey in it? She will be
better if she drinks.'

That much Cunomar could easily do. He ran for
water and returned. Cwmfen drank and lay back.
Her breathing was easier than it had been. The
apprentice boy stood. He was fastidious in his
personal hygiene. Cunomar watched him tear a
fine strip of linen from one of their best sheets and
use it to wipe the blood from his hands. Clean
and with the sick woman settled, he returned his
attention to his message.

'You have to leave,' he said. 'The guards will
arrange that your absence is not noted, at least in
the first instance, possibly ever. Ostia is watched
by men loyal to Agrippina. You cannot go there,
so you will be escorted instead to the northern
Gaulish coast. If you ride hard and fast you should
reach it before the middle of October. If you do so,
a vessel will be waiting. It is not yet too late for a
ship to sail across the ocean to Britannia, provided
you do not delay. The emperor has given his
consent to this. The officer of the escort has a
signed order for one family to leave Rome and
travel to the port of Gesoriacum, there to take
ship. Your descriptions are accurate; only the names are different.'

Philonikos could have been a singer as good as Dubornos. ' He had the memory for the lengthy
tales and lineages, learned back down the ages, if
not the capacity to think through what he had
said. Or perhaps his attention was still elsewhere.
He hovered uncertainly by the bed, watching
Cwmfen take her infant son to her breast to feed.
His gaze was clinical, assessing the flow of milk
and the evident strength of the infant. Cunomar
watched his father melt at the unspeakable beauty
of it.

'Philonikos?' Dubornos shook the boy's arm.
'Why should Claudius do this? He has no love for
any of us, no wish to see Britannia rise against him
again.'

'He knows he's dying.' It was Caradoc who
answered. Rousing himself, he sat down by the
bed and slid a scarred and cramped hand beneath
his child, supporting the infant's weight to spare
Cwmfen's arms. 'Britannia was his conquest, his
passion and his claim to immortality. He has no
reason to bequeath it in peace to Agrippina. This
is his revenge.'

The physician's apprentice nodded. 'And he
may repent past acts. It is not unknown in one
who feels the cold wind of death; he wishes to
make amends in life that he may not be called
to account by the souls of the dead when he meets
them. Certainly Xenophon believes this. You are
not the only ones tonight for whom messengers
bear signed warrants of release. But there is need
for haste. These few apart, Agrippina has control
of the Guard. If she hears . . .' He faltered. The
two parts of him, messenger and physician, came
together for the first time. 'But you can't,' he said.
'Cwmfen and the babe - they can't ride yet.'

It had been obvious from the start. Cunomar
had known it and seen the weight of it in
Caradoc's gaze. He had not counted on Dubornos'
seeing it, too. The singer said, 'I'll stay with
Cwmfen. Caradoc will take his children home to
their birthright.'

'No.' From the far side of the bed, his father's
stone-grey eyes met the singer's quiet brown, both
resolute.

Cunomar felt a fault crack along the foundations
of his world. For more than two years,
living so close as to step on each other's toes, these
two men had striven to hold a family together, had
laid aside their differences, such as they may have
been, and had worked together more closely than
brothers. Now, most of all, it mattered that they
not come into conflict.

Desperately willing it otherwise, he heard
Dubornos say, 'You are needed on Mona, by the
tribes as much as the dreamers. The governor is
weak; the western tribes have set the boundaries
and the legions dare not cross. With you back, the
warriors of all the tribes will be united as never
before. East will join with west to drive the legions
back all the way to Rome. They'll see it as a gift
from the gods, a demonstration of their unqualified
support for our cause - and fairly so.
You have no choice but to return. The gods
and the people need you. Mona needs you.'
At the end, unsaid, because no-one ever spoke
the name aloud, or needed to, Breaca needs you, They were weapons Dubornos had no right to
use, and he did so shamelessly. Caradoc stared
down at his feeding son. From the bed, Cwmfen
said, 'He's right. You have to go. You and the
children.' She was a warrior; her voice never
wavered. That Agrippina would kill both her and
the infant was obvious to them all.

The babe squirmed and was changed to the
other breast. In the streets outside, a hound
barked and was kicked to silence. A legionary
coughed and his armour rattled. Caradoc knelt by
the bed, staring at a world none of them could see.
Cunomar set his fingers to his brow as he had seen
his mother do before battle and prayed to Briga
and Nemain and the great, vast god of the ocean
that his father might, this one last time, set aside
his pride and let Dubornos have his way.

The ringed scar left by the shackles at Caradoc's
neck wavered in the fey light, pulsing to the slow
and steady rhythm of his heart. Without doubt,
Cygfa got her courage from her father. Cunomar
kept his gaze on his father's face, offering silent
support. He brought his mother to mind as he had
not done in two years and sent the essence of her
into the room to call him.

When Caradoc raised his eyes, they fell first on
his new son and then on Cunomar who saw the
full measure of pain and unbearable burdens.
The voice he heard was the one his father used in
council but only rarely, announcing the dishonourable
death of a warrior. 'I rode away from
battle once leaving others to die in my place,'
Caradoc said. 'I do not believe the gods would ask
it of me again. We go together or not at all.'

Cunomar choked and did his best to keep it
silent.

After a space that lasted for ever, Dubornos
said, 'Then we stay. Cwmfen can't ride.'

'But she might travel if we find her a litter. Is
that not so?' Caradoc turned aside to Philonikos
who was standing apart, doing his best not to be
included. Pressed into a response, the lad gave a
half-hearted nod.

'Good.' Caradoc stood. He had more certainty
then than Cunomar had seen at any time since the
day on the plain under the burning sun when he
had faced down the emperor. Cunomar thought
he might break with pride until he heard the next
words his father said.

'Dubornos will ride ahead with Cygfa and catch
the ship. They can carry the news that we're
coming. The rest of us will travel slowly, at whatever
pace Philonikos allows, and if we reach the
coast late we'll find another ship, or wait until
spring. The fighting season is over. Mona will live
without us another half year and if the dreamers
know we are coming, that will be enough.'

Dubornos and Cygfa, the two warriors, who
could ride and fight. Cunomar heard the names
and his breath clogged his throat. His mind
screamed, an incoherent welter of pain without
words behind it.

Dubornos, friend for ever, heard him and shook
his head, saying, 'The ship can carry the message
but not us. You said it: we go together or not at
all. I will not sail to Mona without you.'

So then, whether it was safe or not, the mettle
of each man was tested and found equal by the
other. The hush of the room held them long
enough for this last confrontation, for the seeking
of weaknesses and the acknowledgement, at last,
that they did not exist.

Caradoc broke away first. Rising, he gave his
son to Cwmfen and kissed her. To Cunomar and
Cygfa, he said, 'Start packing. You will need
travelling clothes, gold and a knife each, nothing
else.' To the physician's apprentice, who stared as
if his ears had lied, he said, 'Philonikos, bring
what you need to care for Cwmfen on the journey.
If Xenophon sent you now, he meant you to come
with us at least to Gaul. He values your life and
safety as much as ours. If he is in danger, he would
want to know you were safe.'

It was not a request but a command, given by
one with long experience of leadership. Philonikos,
opened his mouth and shut it again. In eighteen
months of service in the palace, he had learned
when not to argue.

The fire began as they packed. Smoke leaked
through the floorboards, giving form to the lamplight.
In the next apartment, the fat Latin woman
howled in alarm and was echoed by others on
either side and across the street. The guards posted
outside were already helping to evacuate the
building. A detachment crashed upstairs, passing
in single file up the narrow space. They came
burdened, their footfalls weightily unbalanced as
if by firewood or weapons or both. It would not
be the first time; everyone knew someone who had
died at Claudius' command and others who had
succumbed to fires in the ill-protected tenements.

Cunomar was carrying his father's pack to the
front room when the soldiers reached the door.

'Cunomar-' His father's voice was unusually
soft. 'Put the pack down and come here.'

Doing as he was bid, he ran across the room,
panic pushing at his guts. His father's arms
enfolded him. Strong hands that had once led
armies ruffled his hair in a way they had not done
since childhood. His father's lips rasped drily on
his forehead and the deep voice of council said,
'My son, can you stay with Cwmfen? She needs
someone to help her.'

Cunomar went, not asking what a warrior who
had just given birth might need help with in the
face of the enemy. Cygfa was already there, alert
and watchful. She smiled wryly at Dubornos as
she had not done these past two years and the
singer met it with relief. If he had had any time for
regret, Cunomar would have mourned the fact
that it had taken the certainty of death to begin to
heal that rift.

The door crashed open. Cunomar saw Caradoc
meet Dubornos' eye and step round to stand with
him, shoulders pressed together in front of the
bed. Neither was armed; their amnesty had
expressly forbidden the keeping of weapons.
There were knives for cooking but none within
reach. Dubornos began to sing the song of soul 
passing, quietly.

Caradoc said, 'And so we argued for nothing.
The gods, it seems, would prefer us to stay.' It was
said wryly, with humour at last, another brought
to wholeness by the promise of escape from life.

A helmetless, dark-haired man poked his head
round the door. Smoke framed him. He scanned
the room, taking in its occupants, and jerked his
head, speaking over his shoulder. In harsh, parade
ground Latin, he said, 'Here. Three adults, two
children and the doctor's boy.' He turned back.
'And a babe.' He was puzzled. 'We don't have a
babe.'

'We don't need one,' said a voice that stopped
the world. 'The fire will be good. No-one will be looking for an infant.'

It was a nightmare, a dream without substance.
Relief crushed the air from Cunomar's throat;
however bad they may seem at the time, such
things were escapable. On Mona, every apprentice
had been taught the techniques to ensure safe
waking from a dangerous dream. For the
dreamers, it was life-saving; for the children, an
escape from unpleasantness that made the nights
safe. Airmid had taught Cunomar the way to do it
long ago when he had dreamed three nights in a
row that Ardacos made the protection wards
wrongly and the enemy had found them. All he
needed was to find something that should be solid
and prove that it was not, then he would know he
was dreaming and his mind would wake him up.

Focusing on the upright of a corner between
two walls, he began to do as Airmid had taught
him and was surprised to see Dubornos do the
same; he had not expected to be sharing his nightmare.
It might have been comic were it not so
desperate. In an effort to prove that nothing was
real Dubornos did his best to pass his hand
smartly through the wall to his left. His knuckles
barked on rough plaster and he scraped skin off
his palm when he tried the other way. Cunomar,
watching in astonishment, tried the same and was
equally hurt.

'Hitting walls won't stop the fire, singer.' The
voice mocked from the doorway, in Eceni. 'You
can roast if you like, but I would consider it
churlish myself, as would the shade of the
emperor, I have no doubt. And it would leave
those who remain behind to explain why the
bodies of two identical red-headed singers were
found in the ashes of the fire, which would be
damnably inconvenient.'

Cunomar lifted his eyes slowly, still locked in
the nightmare. The man he had been told was his
mother's brother, the most revered of all Eceni
warriors, stood before him in the uniform of an
Urban Guard, grinning. It had been so once
before, on the arid plain where Caradoc had faced
the emperor. There, the man had been an
interpreter and had tried to have them killed. In
horror, Cunomar looked up into his father's eyes
and knew he was not dreaming: the pain and
loathing etched on Caradoc's face were too real
for a dream.

Sharply, Dubornos asked, 'Why are you
here?'

'To escort you to freedom.' The officer smiled like
a hunting snake. 'I made an oath in ignorance;
possibly in arrogance, and this is the penalty. I
suspect we can blame Xenophon for it but he's
beyond our reach. Whoever is at fault, your safety is
my responsibility up to the boarding of a ship on the
northern coast. On my own honour and that of
my god, I am sworn to protect you or die in
the attempt.' His tone took any honour out of the
words. 'Because I prefer to live, we will do what we
can to ensure that your escape is not suspected by
those who might wish to  follow.' He turned to the
doorway. In Latin, quite differently, he said, 'In here Quickly.'

Half a dozen men entered, laden. Their burdens,
when dropped to the floor and rolled from their
sackcloth bindings, were recognizably human and
dead, if not freshly so. Their hair was most
striking, being the most un-Roman. The tallest
pair of adults-were blond, as were the two youths.
The single, slightly smaller man was a redhead
balding on top. On his chest, beneath the torn
stuff of his tunic, a knife-wound showed in the
corpse-grey skin.

Cunomar felt tides of nausea wash over him.
His father's hand gripped his shoulder, keeping
him steady. Caradoc was as close to losing control
as Cunomar had ever seen him. His voice sliced
through the smoke. 'You killed them?' he asked.
'These people died in our place because you took
an oath?'

'Of course.' The traitor stared him down.
Cunomar remembered those eyes sometimes, on
the worst of nights when the noise of the city
and the cold and the smell of mouldy plaster all
conspired to keep him awake. Then the black eyes
of a falcon laughed at him from a man's face. He
had never thought to see them again in life. They
flickered over him now and barely noticed his
existence. The voice, full of scorn, said, 'This is
war, Caratacus. If you want to live, others have to
die. When you return to Britannia, you will find it
the same. Unless you want to die here, and your
children with you? You should choose quickly.
Fire has even less patience than I do and I have
little enough.'

They were already risking their lives. Orange
flames raged outside the southern window.
Patches of soot feathered up on the heat. Caradoc
glanced there once and Cunomar saw the decision
made. 'We are packed. We can leave now, but we
cannot press the pace faster than Cwmfen and the
babe can manage.'

'Clearly not. Xenophon thought as much after
his apprentice boy left. She will be escorted in a
litter to the city walls and thence on a wagon until
she is fit to ride. If we are lucky, we will still make
the coast at Gesoriacum before the ship leaves. If
not...'

'We will spend six months as fugitives on
Roman soil?'

The decurion shook his head. His smile was
poisonous. 'Not Roman, no. I had rather thought
we might find somewhere quiet in Gaul. But I
think we should all pray it doesn't come to that.
Half a year in each other's company might be too
much for any of us to bear.'

XXV.

At dawn, in a riverside clearing half a day's ride
south of the sea port of Gesoriacum, beside the
glowing ashes of a night's fire, Valerius, oathbound
decurion, lay awake as he had done for
most of the night, counting the fading stars in an
unsuccessful effort to forget where he was and
whom he was with and how he had come to be
both.

He wanted wine, badly, and there was none to
be had. He had brought three flagons with him
from Rome, thinking them more than enough to
last the journey. Night and morning, he had
measured the doses, using as much as he needed to
keep the ghosts at bay and the voices quiet and his
smile sharp against the constant loathing of
Caradoc and his family.

The longer they travelled and the closer they
came to Gesoriacum with its memories of Caligula
and Corvus, of Amminios and Iccius, of hate and
love and vengeance and death, the more wine It
had taken to retain a semblance of stability. The
last flask had run dry three days since, leaving
Valerius afraid for his sanity. Surprisingly,
Philonikos had helped him, supplying from
his medical stocks a fierce, honeyed liquor of a
strength to burn the throat and send numbness
streaking down the limbs. In the face of spirit that
strong, the whispers of the past had withdrawn
and even the present pressed less closely so that,
for two nights, Valerius had slept. Only in this last
evening, with their destination close at hand, had
the physician's apprentice inexplicably withdrawn
his gift and Valerius felt the lack.

The stars faded too fast. Unlike Britannia,
where he prayed each night for the god's light to
rise and banish the dreams, here, in this place and
this company, the decurion had no wish for day to
begin. He would have welcomed dreams if they
could have displaced the memories of his first visit
to Gesoriacum, of who he had been before he
arrived, and who before that, and before that; or
if they could have erased for one moment the
presence of Caradoc and the accusations the man
carried with him.

The monumental irony of the oath Xenophon
had wrested from Valerius had been its own shield
in the apartment and for the first days out of
Rome but it had not survived long on the road
north. The decurion was used to being feared -even Longinus was afraid of him now - but he was
still respected, even by the Gauls who had
supported Umbricius. Until this journey, he had
not known how his spirit fed on that respect, or
how its opposite drained him. Because he must, he
believed that, with the god's promise of success to
lead him on, he could survive this final day without
any outward sign of what it cost. More deeply,
he knew that one day was the most he had
left.

The stars were gone. The sun cracked open on
the eastern horizon and the god's light spilled
through the trees, smothering the dim glow of the
fire. The fire had never given smoke - Valerius had
built it with care using wood dried the previous
night - but a rising ruffle of hot air tilted mildly to
the left, showing a southerly swing in the breeze.
The music of the river changed note as the wind
backed round and somewhere, a long way distant,
a cock crowed.

Valerius pushed off his cloak and rolled to his
feet. It was a matter of pride that he rose first, as
it was to find the fires of those who hunted them.
They were hunted, there was no doubt of that, and
in this the decurion had the better of the warriors
he led; he knew intimately the exact danger posed
by the hunter, his strengths, his weaknesses and,
he believed, his intent.

There was relief in movement. Soundlessly, he
crossed the clearing and took a path through the
sparse woodland. Behind him, he heard the soft
padding of the warriors as they, too, rose and took
other routes through the woodland. Soon all he
could hear were the noisier strides of the child,
Cunomar, who had been too long in Rome and
had not yet learned to walk silently.

The river was high after ten days of rain and ran
turgid with mud. He found a leaf-stirred eddy at
the side in which to relieve himself and then
moved upstream to check the horses and splash
his face in cleaner water. He felt better for that, the
wine-deprived thickness in his head and tongue
less than they had been. The bank led south and
west to a place where the river widened and the
torrent slowed. He crossed on greasy, treacherous
stepping stones, taking each one slowly and testing
the footing. On the southern bank, a deer path
led through thorn scrub and round a sunken,
grassy dell that rose on its far side in a steeply
wooded slope. He climbed up, using the angled
trunks of the scrub thorn as handholds. Shed
beech leaves, shiny as beaten bronze, crisped
beneath his feet. On the thorns, the berries were
crinkled for winter, holding the damp in heavy
drops that drizzled his thighs and wept coldly onto
his cheeks.

Reaching the crest of the slope, he squirmed
forward under low branches until he had a clear
view out over a broad stretch of water meadow to
a cluster of oak and beech beyond. Smoke rose
faintly over the canopy. Marullus, centurion of the
second cohort of the Praetorian Guard, had never
learned the art of smokeless burning, or perhaps
he was intent on signalling his presence, a warning
sent by a Father to one of his many sons, one
under the blessed cloak of Mithras, set on
opposing sides by ill-fortune and an oath carelessly
taken. They were not yet in conflict and
might never be. The god, one hoped, would
prevent it.

Valerius lay still under the thorns for a while,
letting brisk air and the relief of solitude work a
measure of healing. Presently, as the inner and
outer mists thinned, he saw what he was looking
for: a handful of men moving jerkily amongst the
trees, readying horses for travel, and the one who
lay in the deep cover opposite, watching.

'They're playing with us. They know we're
here.'

Valerius jumped. The speed of it bludgeoned the
delicate parts of his brain as he turned. A bubble
of pure, easy rage rose to his head and burst.
Almost, he struck out. A decade's training as an
officer stopped him, and the oath to his god.

If the girl Cygfa saw the danger and its passing,
she showed no fear. She had come up behind him
silently and sat, as silently, watching. More than
Caradoc with his frigid scorn, or the child
Cunomar with his all-consuming loathing, Cygfa
unnerved Valerius. She spoke little and never willingly
to him and yet he had never once moved
apart from the others but she was there on cat's
feet, following. She crouched now in a hidden
space between the thorns, staring at him with her
father's eyes.

Some time in the journey, she had begun to
braid her hair in the way of the warrior - an act
forbidden in Rome - and overnight she had found
three crow feathers and woven them into the left
side. They hung damply in the mist and her face
thus framed, was that of sexless, androgynous
youth so that Valerius, biting his lower lip, had to
repeat aloud in his mind the single fact that this
was a woman, not a man, and that the god would
never return Caradoc to him cleared of age and all
betrayal, or those who had been lost to his
treachery. Amminios was lying ... What would
you have done if you had known Breaca was still
alive ... ?

Enough. Stop now. He knows.

The decurion held himself still and believed he showed nothing.

Cygfa raised a familiar, mocking brow. 'Do you not intend to slay these men as you did their
tracker?'
She asked it to goad him, not because she was
interested in his answer. Early in their flight, two
days out of Rome, he had left his charges for half
an evening to hunt down and cut the throat of the
single Dacian tribesman who followed their trail.
He had said nothing to the others but Cygfa,
following, had witnessed it and word had spread
amongst the others of the man's death and,
perhaps, of the needlessness of it; the tracker had
lost their trail when he died. If he had been confronted,
Valerius could have countered with his
argument that the group would travel faster without
the need for secrecy and that one dead tracker
was one fewer enemy wielding a blade against
them later, but the question had never come and
he had not chosen to raise it himself.

All this, he read in Cygfa's eyes as she watched
him watch the watchers. On any other day,
Valerius would have walked away, but her choice
to braid the kill-feathers had made of her presence
a greater challenge and, on this last day, he was
tired of challenges. Answering the words, if not
their intent, he said, 'We can't attack now. We are
too few against their many.'

'And yet they still don't attack us. We were
vulnerable when Cwmfen was lying ill in the
wagon, less so now that she is better and can ride,'
she said. 'Why do they stay back?'

She thought like her father, or like Longinus. It
was not good to think of him. Longinus had
charge of the wing while his decurion was away.
Their parting had not been easy but nothing
between them had been easy since Valerius had
come back from Rome with the need for wine
increased.

Valerius eased back to a place he could sit up
without being seen. It might not have been
necessary, but there was an integrity in the fiction
of concealment. 'They are waiting for a signal,' he
said. 'When they have it, they will attack.'

'Or they wait until Claudius is dead.'

'The two are the same.' Her Latin was stilted,
not as fluent as her parents'. Easing himself down
the bank to the shallow dip of the dell, Valerius
found himself matching the cadence of it. 'When
Claudius dies and Nero is made emperor, the
signal will come. Then they will be safely under
Agrippina's command and can act without the
dishonour of treason.'

Cygfa sneered. 'So in Roman eyes, it is
honourable to kill an infant of fourteen days if
the command comes from the woman who is the
emperor's mother, but not if it comes when she i
only his wife and his niece?'

The dell was crowded with the debris of the
forest. The hollow carcass of a beech trunk lay,
across it, speckled with bright, toxic droplets of
red and orange fungi and old rodent droppings.
Valerius jumped onto the top, rocking it rottenly
beneath his feet. The action matched the rhythm
of the throbbing in his head and soothed it. He
thought the girl might walk on alone, but she
waited, her eyes still asking the same fatuous
question about Roman honour as if anything
other than that same honour had kept her alive
these past fourteen days.

Bluntly, he asked, 'Have you ever slain a man in
battle?'

The grey eyes scorned him. She raised a finger to
the topmost of her feathers. 'You have seen me do so.'

'And they were men, who were once fourteen-dayold
infants, yet you killed them without
hesitation, am I right?'

'That's different.'

'Is it so? Is life less precious to the grown man
who loves life and understands exactly what he
has to lose, than to the infant who knows only the
comfort of the womb and the muzzling warmth of
his mother's breast? I think not.' A dog fox had
used the log as a marking post. The musk of its
scent rose with his rocking, metallic as horse sweat
and the tears of the dead. Breathing it in, Valerius
said, 'This is the reality of war. Thirty years spent
living and growing make little difference if the
soul you set free is that of an enemy. A child slain
today will not grow to be the warrior who drives
a blade into your back twenty years hence and
that is what may keep you alive. You are a
warrior; you should know that.'

She said, 'We would never kill the children of
our enemies.'

'I know. That is why you will lose the war and
we will win it.'

He jumped down from the log and began to
force a way through the scrub beyond. Cygfa's
voice sought him out. 'If you despise us so much,'
she asked, 'why do we yet live?'

In half a month of travel, not one of them had
yet suggested he might betray them. Valerius
stopped still. Her gaze speared his back. He spun
slowly on one heel. 'I told you in Rome,' he said.
'I took an oath. Before my god, such things are
binding.'

'And why was this oath asked of you?'

'I have no idea.' He pushed on away from her,
raising his hands to protect his face from the
thorns. He lied, of course; he had a very good idea
why it had been asked, the crux of which involved
Theophilus and Xenophon, two Greek physicians
who took their care of the soul as seriously as they
did the healing of the body that clothed it. He did
not share his thought.

Cygfa followed him along a path that was no
path, stretching under the dragging brambles
kicking through thorns and nettle beds. Emerging,
Valerius ran across the mud-greased stepping
stones; a warriors' challenge to reach the far bank
without falling. Long ago, he had watched three
other men run a rain-wet log across a river. Only
one of them had fallen and he the one who
mattered least.

Valerius reached the far bank with dry feet.
Success rallied him. He said, 'To find why the oat
was asked, you would have to ask the emperor,
who may be dead. Perhaps Dubornos can ask him
for you. He seems to have friends amongst those
who have already joined the gods. I do not.'

'No. In the realms of the dead, there are those
who merely hate you and those who will wait for
eternity to greet your death and avenge their own.
Anyone can see it.'

'Indeed?' He heard his own voice brittle. 'Are
you a dreamer that you can see the souls of the
dead?'

'Hardly. I don't need to be. Any child can see
those that circle you.'

He walked away, leaving her on the far bank
with the stones ahead of her, and did not wait to
see how she fared.
He came to the clearing alone. The rest of the
group were ready and waiting. Cwmfen had Math
bundled against her chest, ready to ride. The child
was growing hair, fuzzily, and his eyes were less
vacant. His mother had made good progress under
Philonikos' care; for the past three days, she had
begun to take an active part in the journey where
before she had lain in a wagon and all her strength
had been taken simply to live.

Today, she had spread the fire and doused it,
covering the ash with the turf cut the previous
night and scattering old leaves over that. The
centurion and his party might find their campsite,
but only by diligent searching, and the very act of
looking for it would lose them time. It might not
matter when their destination was so obvious, but,
again, there was a warrior's integrity in concealment
and none would willingly break it.

The men had been similarly busy; at the margins
of the clearing, the horses were gathered and
unhobbled. The wagon mules had been
abandoned long since and a mare bought for
Cwmfen so that all of them rode horses of good
blood, but for Cunomar who had been given a
small, cobby gelding. The child was there now,
standing by his mount, breaking his fast with his
father on the cold roasted saddle of a hare which
Dubornos had caught the night before. The singer
claimed to have sung it into his hand, a conceit
Valerius did not believe. The man looked up and
waved in ready friendship. Valerius stopped,
staring, and then heard Cygfa's soft tread behind
him and the sibilant Ordovician greeting.

She would have walked past, but he intercepted
her and, so that the others might hear, said, 'We
will reach Gesoriacum this afternoon. You will
have to either unbraid your hair or cover it if you
do not wish to be arrested for sedition. I suggest
you take that seriously. Tomorrow is the Ides of
October and the last chance for a ship to sail. If
Claudius can live two more days, you will be safe
and I can return to my unit. When I am free of this
oath, we will see which side is stronger.'

Caradoc's daughter grinned at him, baring her
teeth as uncounted others had done on uncounted
battlefields, and she spoke the words that every
man and woman who had opposed him had said,
in one form or another. 'I will greet the day with
delight. Your head will look good mounted on a
spear at the roundhouse on Mona.'

Of all the things she had said that morning,
Valerius considered that last most often in the long
day's ride towards the coast. In the days when he
had been Ban of the Eceni, his people would not
have kept the heads of their enemies as trophies.
The bodies of even the most reviled foes had been
given intact to the carrion eaters and the gods of
the forest.

Gesoriacum, port and civic centre, had changed
little in the sixteen years since the youthful
Caligula had ordered the great pinnacle of the
lighthouse built and sailed his flagship Euridyke out onto the ocean to accept Amminios' surrender,
claiming as he did so victory over both Neptune
and Britannia.

For Valerius, return flayed to the white bone a
mind already laid open by the journey. In
Britannia, new memories overlaid the old and it
was possible to forget what had been. Here, too
much was too familiar. The land around the town
was quieter than he had known it, lacking two
legions camped on its margins, but the brisk,
sharp smell of the sea made his eyes water as it
had always done and brought on the vague nausea
that had dogged his every voyage. The wind tore
the words from his mouth and the circling
seabirds cried with the voices of the dead and he
was glad, then, that Cygfa could hear them as well
as he could.

They reached the walls in the late afternoon,
dipping down into the valley of a small stream and
walking the horses up a meandering path to the
southern gate. On the far side of the town, a fishing
boat had put into the harbour, drawing its
blizzard of screaming gulls behind. The noise of
them was crippling. Valerius' morning headache,
lacking the medication of wine of Philonikos'
spirits, had increased with the passing miles so
that, as they approached the town, he rode forward
blindly, letting his mare pick her own route.
His helmet bound tight along his brow, as if
the metal had shrunk or his head swollen, and the
pressure of it crushed his mind.

The sky was too bright. He looked down, focusing
with pained clarity on the crushed grasses and
small, withered autumn flowers that pricked the
turf in pink and white. His mare had a white
pastern on her left fore and the hoof beneath it
was striped brown against amber. He was counting the stripes in his mind, repeating the number,
over and over in Gaulish, Thracian and Latin, trying not to be sick, when Caradoc, riding behind
him, said, 'They've kindled the lighthouse fires. IS
that normal in daytime?'

What would you have done if-

'What? Where?'

'Behind and to the right.'

The nausea vanished. The pressure of his helmet
became a necessary protection. Valerius looked
up. From the platform of the lighthouse north and east of their position, buckets of pitch poured
oiled black smoke up into the daytime sky, poisonous against high, drifting clouds.

'It's the end of a signal chain.' He knew it in his
gut. 'They'll be responding to another.' He looked
around, cursing the sea and the gulls and his wine-deprived
inattention, and saw what he should
have done before. He thrust out an arm, pointing. 'There.'

Behind them, far back in the hills, a column of
grey smoke slanted on an unfelt breeze. The canopy of the woodland nearly concealed it; had
they been a mile further down in the valley, they would have been as blind to its presence as were the nine armoured men who rode out of the woodland
on the far side of the stream and, as one,
halted their horses and looked up to the column of smoke rising above the town.

Valerius felt ice ball in his chest. 'Claudius is
dead,' he said, and, with the same certainty,
'Agrippina rules. We're dead too if we stay in the
open.' Cwmfen rode just behind him, the infant
Math strapped to her chest. Her face was lined
with pain and fatigue but he had seen it worse.

He asked, 'Can you ride at the gallop?'

'If I have to.'

'You do.' He spun his horse and swept out his
arm, taking them all in. 'Ride for the south gate
and follow me through the town. Anyone who
lags behind will be left to Agrippina's men. I
wouldn't expect them to be kind.'

Gesoriacum was crowded. It was not likely
that the entire population had actually emptied
onto the streets to impede their passage, it simply
felt like it. The roads were narrower than Rome's
so that the litters of matrons paying afternoon
visits to the villas of friends took the whole width
from house front to house front and held up the
men on foot, dawdling, and the fisherfolk streaming
to and from the harbour and the merchants
and the stationary wagons - because Rome's daytime
ban on wheeled vehicles did not extend to the
provinces - and the dogs and the children who ran
for their mothers as the strangers on horseback
passed through, uncivilly fast. They still cleared
the way, tardily, but enough. On this last day,
Valerius had taken time in mid-morning to shake
out the uniform of the Urban Guard from his pack
and don it over his travelling tunic. Even those
who might have understood the meaning of the
lighthouse fire would not risk offending an officer
from Rome.

The town's harbour was a small one, for all that
it had seen half an invasion fleet depart a decade
before. Warehouses, merchants' stalls and fishers
cottages crowded close up to the quayside with
only a cobbled path to keep them from toppling
forward into the water. A low stone wall projected out into the sea, studded with oak mooring posts.
Three green-painted fishing boats ranged prow to
stern along the left-hand side of it, each tilted
to seaward, their flaking keels resting on mud,
straining against taut mooring ropes. On the right,
a barnacled merchant ship lay similarly grounded.
Valerius stared at it, cursing floridly in Thracian.

'The tide's out. We can't sail.' Caradoc was the seaman amongst them, but even Cunomar could
have told that the ship was not going to sail this
side of high tide. The child's father dismounted
and knelt on the rimed stone of the jetty, leaning
down to study the clusters of bubbled weed and
the wavering lines of molluscs. The sea rolled up
and down at its leisure, in no hurry to rise or to
fall.

Caradoc sat back on his heels. 'It's on the turn,'
he said. 'But the ships won't be afloat before
nightfall. No master in his right mind will sail
before dawn. Agrippina's men will be here
long before then.'

They were here already. Far back on the
southern edge of town, litter-bound matrons and
dawdling men clucked and flustered a second time
as another group of armed horsemen carved their
way towards the harbour.

Valerius cursed viciously in three additional
languages, then, 'You need to get out of sight.
When you're safe, I'll find the ship's master. He'll
sail tonight if I have to hold a knife to his throat
as he does it.'

Cwmfen said, 'You'd see us all drown?'

'I'd see you half a mile offshore and out of reach
of Marullus and his men. That much my oath
requires. What happens to you after is not my
concern. Come on.'

His horse's feet skidded on mud as he turned.
Momentarily, the slanting sun blinded him. He
accepted with gratitude the god's reminder of his
promised success, so close now he could reach out
and touch it. He did not doubt that Marullus
would concede defeat as soon as the ship was
safely offshore. A Father did not hold grudges
against a son when he had lost a challenge in fair
combat. In the meantime, action kept the ghosts at
bay almost as well as wine.

He blinked and the sun was gone. On the quayside,
a small crowd had gathered. Mucky-nosed
children gawped openly at his armour. Valerius
moved his hand to cover the mark of the red bull
on his left shoulder and jerked his head at Caradoc
who was staring into the crowd. 'Mount, now,
before you attract more attention. The Praetorians
will pay for information. We should see there's
little to be had.'

He led them west and then east and then
doubled back west again, threading his way into
the poorest quarter, dismounting and leading the
horses when the streets became too narrow to
ride. They left them eventually in a cattle pen at a
butcher's, with the man paid enough to buy the promise of silence and scared into its certainty by
the threat of the emperor's displeasure and they' more tangible danger of the decurion's knife. Some
men can threaten death with absolute authenticity;
Valerius had found these last ten years that he was
one of these.

The tavern to which he brought them was in an
alleyway so narrow that the churned, dog-soiled
mud of its floor never saw sunlight. Wedged in the
gap between a tannery and a laundry, the inn
made no effort to avoid the stench of either, or to
pretend, as others might have done, that the fabric
of the walls was anything but a fire trap, or that
the beds had ever been free of lice.

The proprietor was a man of uncertain ancestry
who called himself, with due irony, Fortunatus. Over the years, he had acquired the art of hazy recall in the identification of his clients. Rarely did
a face stick in his mind and then only if the
circumstances were unique. In his years of service,
Fortunatus had only once before played host to a junior officer of the cavalry and then it had seemed accidental, the meanderings of a young
man lost in search of himself, brought to wine for
solace and, perhaps, repentance, and to this place
above all others for its guaranteed anonymity. That man was older now, of higher rank, and if
the hair was as black and the lean delicacy of his
features as striking as they had been, the fires that
fed his soul burned manifestly more harshly.
Seeing him in the doorway, the proprietor
breathed in danger much as his clients breathed
the stench of stale urine and rotting skins and
hated it with the same fervour.

'We need a room from now until dusk.'

The decurion's voice was quiet and did not
allow the possibility that he might be refused. The
coins that spilled from his palm onto the noisome
straw of the floor were worth more than the inn
and its half-dozen boy-whores combined. His
right hand, resting lightly on the hilt of his dagger,
made the alternatives clear. Fortunatus was grossly
obese, partly as a defence against clients' knives;
only the longest would reach any vital organ,
shielded by the layers of fat. He was considering
his possible courses of action when the decurion
raised one fine black brow and shifted his hand to
his cavalry sword, which looked easily long
enough to run through a horse and still spit the
man behind it. The proprietor jerked his chin
towards a curtained opening. At this time of day,
his one room was always free.

The officer's smile was charming and entirely
unpleasant. 'We are not here. You have neither
seen us nor heard of us. If you value your life, you
will remember that, as will the rest of your ...
staff. You will find us cheese, bread and olives that
are fit to eat and a flagon of watered wine that a
child can drink safely.'

The man had no sense of humour, clearly; no-one else could have said that last and kept a
straight face. Fortunatus' nod became a palsied
bobbing of the head. Only after the curtain had
dropped behind the woman bearing the infant did
he find his girth was such that he could not stoop
to fetch the coins on the floor and had to ask one 
of his 'staff' to find them for him.

He had not counted them as they fell. The
urchin he had picked was one of the few with any
intelligence which may have been a mistake; the
lad handed up a handful of copper and silver, but
no gold. Fortunatus had seen gold. He was reaching
behind the bar for his whipping rod when a
knife blade came from nowhere and hung
horizontally in the air beneath his chin, cutting
like a razor into the first row of jowls. He found
himself frozen, too shocked even to sweat.

'How much for the boy?'

Fortunatus knew the decurion by the unnatural
quiet of his voice. The man was just behind his
shoulder, where either or both the knife and the
cavalry sword could skewer him. If the curtain
had moved, the tavern-master had not seen it, but
clearly the officer was here and asking a question
that any other client might ask. The boy had been
beautiful once. His hair, although matted, was still
so blond as to be almost white and his lowered
brows failed to hide the strange blue gaze of the
Belgae. He raised them now; he, too, had seen
the colour of the officer's money and was doing
what he could to make himself presentable. In
poor light, he might still be considered attractive.
Fortunatus thought of a price and doubled it.

'Ten denarii?' A value greater than half a
month's legionary pay but less than he had seen
dropped to the straw. He tried hard not to make it
sound like a question but his voice betrayed him.

The decurion hissed nastily. The sharp edge of
the knife shaved the skin over Fortunatus' larynx.
The humourless voice said, 'Not for the afternoon.
To keep. For life. How much?'

Fortunatus was sweating now. A river of scalding
saltiness ran into his left eye, stinging it so that
he could not think. The knife-tip moved up to rest
below that same eye. A single gold piece appeared
in the air beside it, twin to the one that had been
dropped on the floor. Or perhaps it was the same
one and had never dropped. 'I will give this to you
and you will give me the boy. He is mine, now and
for always. Is that clear?'

At last, a question Fortunatus could answer,
which was good, because it took all his presence of
mind not to nod. It mattered not to nod; the knife
was too close to his eye to allow him to move
unless he wanted to lose it.

'It's clear,' he said.

'Thank you.' The knife was removed.
Fortunatus allowed himself to breathe. The lethal
voice said, 'Every one of the adults in that room is
armed. If they are disturbed, they are sworn to
leave you dying, whatever else befalls them, and if
they fail, I will find you and take vengeance. You
will not enjoy that. Do we understand each other?'

'Yes.'

'Good.' The decurion turned to his new purchase. 'You have a name?'

The lad was bright enough to understand that
his entire life had just been altered for ever by a
man who wielded a knife as if killing came without a second thought. He shook his head. His
mouth flapped, but no sound came out.

'But you understand Latin.' The man smiled coldly. 'Then you are Amminios. Remember that; It's a name with a history and there are others who 
will know and admire it. Come with me. We have
work to do.'

Fortunatus waited until the two shadows, man
and boy, had passed beyond the exit to the alley
before he sank down onto both knees and felt
through the mouldering straw for the remaining
coins. He found no gold piece.

The tavern was full when Valerius returned. He
had bought a cloak and pulled it close to his
uniform, hiding all but the shape of his cavalry
sword, which ensured his safety. The Belgic
urchin, who had not spoken the entire afternoon,
waited at the alley's mouth. He may have been
voiceless, but he had eaten and drunk at the quay
side, both with the desperation of the half-starved.
Valerius had thought there was a possibility the
lad might have run then, but fear of the consequences
and lack of anywhere else to go kept
him at heel like a beaten hound all the way back
to the mouth of the passageway leading to the inn,
through which nothing short of extreme violence
would have made him pass.

'Stay then,' Valerius had said. 'Keep watch.
Look, you can wait in the doorway to the tanner's.
Here, take this.' He had given him a denarius,
flashily silver. The boy had clutched it as if it were
more food. 'If anyone in a uniform comes asking
questions, get word to me.'

The lad had scuttled into the tannery doorway.
He might leave, he might stay. Valerius had no
way to predict, nor, particularly, did he care; he
had bought the boy on impulse and was putting
some effort into not dissecting his motives for
having done so. It would be a blessing in many
ways not to have to make any further decisions
regarding his future. 

In the front room of the tavern, amongst drinking,
fornicating men, Fortunatus was waiting,
wringing fat hands. 'The room ... I have clients
... they need privacy.'

'Really? I hadn't noticed.' The tavern-keeper
stank worse than the boy had done, of stale sweat
and unwashed man-meat. The urge to kill him, as
an act of mercy and a cleansing of the world, was
overwhelming. Valerius kept both hands by his
sides. 'You've been paid enough. We'll be gone
before dark.'

'Good. Will you? Thank you. Good.'
Fortunatus nodded. Flesh-bound eyes glinted,
piggily, seeing greater fortunes. Valerius pushed
past, taking care not to touch either the man or his
nearest client, and slid into the back room.

In the other world beyond the curtain, lamps had been lit and food shared. The claustrophobic
space had been tidied to warrior neatness with
fresh straw on the floor and the foul bedding
rolled away in a corner. Bread, cheese and olives
had been eaten and the remains stored for later. In
a corner, seated on clean straw, the physician's
apprentice was tending Cwmfen, who bore his
ministrations with the fortitude of a mother who
humours a child. At her side, Cunomar played
knucklebones with Cygfa. The girl had braided
the crow feathers back into her hair in a clear act ,
of defiance. Valerius saw it distantly, noting it with
that part of his mind that could still function, the
same part that saw the flask of wine and judged
it almost full. The rest faced the three men
sitting round the table, each one armed with a
sword of Gaulish making, each of whom laid
a hand on his weapon as the door-skin fell and
was still. 

Three men.

Valerius had left two.

Nothing had prepared him. Nothing could have
prepared him. He stopped, his legs at once ice and
water, too stiff and too weak to move. On the far
side of the room, a bare spear's length away, Luain
mac Calma, heron-dreamer of Hibernia, elder of
the council of Mona, once-lover of Macha, who
was dead, rose smoothly on long, angled legs.
After a moment's appraisal, he extended his arm
in the traditional salute of dreamer to warrior.

'Ban mac Eburovic. Welcome. They told me you
had changed. I would not have believed how
much.'

Valerius felt his jaw slacken and shut it tightly. Ban mac Eburovic. His name means white in the
language of the Hibernians, Excellency, the place
where he was conceived. He had heard that long
ago, and believed it; the one who had spoken had
no reason to lie and every reason to know the
truth. Unlike the man opposite with his lean face
and straight black hair and high brow, who held a
hand out to Valerius and named him son
of Eburovic, the man who must have known that
Eburovic, master-smith of the Eceni, had never
been to Hibernia and could not have sired a son
there on Macha or any other woman.

I am Valerius, decurion, child of the one god
and of my Father under the Sun. The name and
nature of the one who sired me matters not. The
words beat on the inside of his temples, awakening
the headache, which had all but gone. Without
his directing it, the heel of his hand passed over his
sternum, pressing squarely on the raven brand,
and then touched briefly to the bull on his shoulder.
In his mind, he spoke the name of the god.

Aloud he asked, 'What are you doing here?'

Mac Calma sheathed his sword. 'We were
awaiting your return. You need a ship. By now,
you will have found that the master of the Gesoriaca will not sail before dawn. There is a
second ship, anchored offshore a short distance
westward along the coast. She sails under a master
of greater courage. I will take you to him.'

'Really? How thoughtful. I'm sure Caratacus is
grateful that his dreamer knows the minds of
other men. Sadly I have other plans.' Valerius
voice was softer than it had been. A Gaulish
actuary had died hearing just such a voice.
'Perhaps I did not frame the question correctly.
How do you come to be in this room in this town
when our flight was known only to the emperor
and to Xenophon?'

'And to the Empress Agrippina. You kno
Marullus is searching the town from south to
north seeking word of you?'

'And you, presumably, know the fate of any
dreamer caught alive on Gaulish soil. Neither
point answers my question. How did you know of
our flight and how, exactly, did you know we wer
here?'

Images of Fortunatus, skewered for treachery,
etched themselves across Valerius' mind. He
cleared them temporarily, awaiting an answer.

'I have friends in the port. They tell me things
that may be useful.' Luain was smiling. His eyes
were those of a heron, stalker of still waters. Gulls
cried in the harbour. I have heard they can send
their spirits as white birds on the wind ...

The dreamer said, 'You and the Belgic boy can
hide out in the harbour-master's whorehouse if
you choose, but I will not let you take Caradoc or
his family to a place where they will be caught like
cornered rats. The gods have other need of them.
They come with me. If you value the oath you
made in the name of your foreign god, you can
come with us west to the Sound of Manannan and
see them safely aboard the ship that will sail with
the moonrise tide. Alternatively, if you surrender
now to the centurion who hunts you, you may be
able to persuade him that you are as loyal to the
new emperor as you were to the old and perhaps
he will lift the charge of treachery that is laid
against you.'

Treachery. The god had promised success.
Whatever the dreamer said, Marullus was only a
centurion; he did not have the power to lift
a charge of treason, or the penalty of death that
accompanied it. Only the new emperor could do
that: Nero, whose mother ruled for him.
Agrippina was not known for the breadth of her
mercy.

Valerius did not waste his breath asking how
the dreamer knew of the harbour-master's whorehouse;
the mere fact that he did was enough to
render it unsafe. He weighed the risks and his
options. The charge should not have come as such
a surprise. Xenophon had been explicit and the
risks had always been clear: if Valerius was careless,
he would die. He did not believe he had been
careless so far. He tried to build the image of the
god on the dirty plaster of the far wall as he had
done in the emperor's palace and could not do so.
Striving for distance, he said, 'An enticing choice.
Which did your dream tell you I would do?'

Luain mac Calma stared at the same patch of
peeling paint and shook his head, as if the effort
and its failure were clear to him. 'My dreams tell
me nothing,' he said. 'What you will do is not yet
known. At any given time, the gods offer differen
paths to the future. They never force our choice of
which to take.'

Valerius was losing composure. His smile
stretched too tight over his teeth. His skin had
shrunk, or his skull grown, and his joints had stiffened. The Infinite Sun, in whose name he had
given his oath, was silent and yet the oath
remained. He said, 'They must at least laugh at
our indecision.'

The dreamer shook his head, his hunter's eyes
wide as the moon. 'I doubt that.'

The pressure in the air was enough to crack
open a walnut. Valerius squeezed his eyes closed.
Orange shapes flared out into the blackness of his
mind. His mother Macha appeared before him,
speaking Eceni, and he ignored her. Iccius
followed her, the Belgic slave-boy who had died in
a hypocaust and was not, absolutely not, come
back to life in a slave-boy newly bought. If Iccius
had lived, the world would have been a different
place.

Valerius had long ago learned to shut out both
of these two voices. In their presence, and in the
absence of the god, he could resort only to
the oath that bound him. He forced his eyes open.
'You should leave here,' he said. 'Fortunatus
has already sold your presence to the town
guard. They wait only for dusk so that they may
seem to find us by accident and he will not die for
it.

'And you?' asked mac Calma. 'What will you
do?'

'Me? I will watch your backs as you leave and
take the time to remind Fortunatus that treachery
is unacceptable. When he is chastened, and I am
sure you are not being followed, the boy and I will
join you.'

He forgot, in the end, that he had named the
child Amminios.

XXVI.

Luain mac Calma led them. Valerius brought up
the rear. They rode in single file along the margins
of the sea-turf. The smell of it rose in the still air,
sharply sweet and spiked with the sorrel freshness
of shoreline herbs crushed underfoot. The light
was failing fast. Out on the ocean, the ship that
promised freedom was a ghost barely seen in the
grey dusk, the sail a billow of white, still too far
away for safety. The sea was restless, white manes
cresting the waves as Manannan rode to greet
them, or to kill. Along the shingle, the hush of
each receding wave brushed the stones, a little
closer each time as the tide came in. Cunomar
watched it, marking in his mind where the next
biggest wave would reach and counting a tally for
when he was right. It was a child's game, but it
kept his mind free of fear and he would die before
he showed fear in the presence of the traitor who
claimed to be his mother's brother and yet wore
Roman uniform.

The horses walked, like hounds, their hidebound
feet falling softly on the turf. Cunomar
rode third from last in the line. Cygfa rode behind
him, keeping him safe both from the pursuing
Romans and from Valerius. She had become more
protective since the morning when she had spent time in Valerius' company, and her disdain of the
man had become more apparent.

The decurion had joined them late, as they were
collecting the horses, and Cunomar had seen him
sheathe a bloody knife, then draw his sword and
slide the length of it into the mud and ordure of
the butcher's holding pens. Sensing himself
watched, the man had raised his eyes and smiled
his cold snake's smile and said, 'The moon is up
and the sky clear. It will help us see the way to the
ship but will also show us to Marullus and his
men. I would advise that you cover your brooches
and bridle bits and if you would not have your
weapons give you away you too, drag them
through the mud. I apologize if it offends your
warriors' instincts.'

This last had been directed with heavy irony at
Cygfa, who had ignored it but nevertheless had
done as the man suggested. Cunomar, disgusted,
had watched as his father, Dubornos and
Cwmfen had all drawn the blades given them by
the dreamer mac Calma and had similarly sullied
them. At the last, he had done the same with the
blade they had given him, but only when ordered
to do it by his father. It was not a way for true warriors to ride into battle.

Riding in the dusk, Cunomar's ears ached with
the effort of listening for the sounds of attack. The
solid weight of the sword tapped against his thigh with each stride of his horse. It should have been reassuring, but was not. All his life, he had wanted to be a warrior, and now the chance had come he knew himself unfit. Cygfa had practised daily with 
the seasoned men and women of Mona before her
first battle. Cunomar had lived more than two
years in Rome where the carrying of weapons was forbidden him and practice impossible on pain of
death for the entire family, but even had he  practised, the blade he had been given was a man's and too heavy for a boy. Testing it in the small
back room of the inn before the decurion had
returned, he had found that if he held it with both
hands, he could perhaps swing it once with
credible force before the enemy closed on him. He
had read the disappointment in his father's eyes and been ashamed, the more so when mac Calma
had gone out again and returned with two small, sharp-pointed daggers, one each for Cunomar and
Philonikos. The physician's apprentice was tall
enough and old enough to bear a blade but had no
skill to use it and was thus treated as a child; it
hurt to be considered in the same thought.

In the time before Valerius walked in, Caradoc
had shown both youths how to use the knives if
there were any danger that they might be captured alive, drilling his finger over and again into the
place between the sixth and seventh ribs on the left
side where they should stab, angling the blade in
towards the breastbone so that the heart and great
vessels would be split. Dubornos had repeated it
later when they reached the horses and then Cygfa
had shown them again after they had mounted, to
make sure they understood. In the eyes of each
warrior could clearly be read the absolute
certainty that it was better to die early than to face
the new emperor's executioners.

Cunomar knew it was better to die in battle
than on his own knife, but he had listened and
repeated their instructions until the act was so real
in his mind it was astonishing that he was still
alive. Imagining it as they rode the shoreline, he
knew both that he could do such a thing for himself
and that the Greek youth did not have such
courage. When the counting of waves could not
take his mind off what was coming, he thought
through the hundred ways in which Cunomar, son
of Caradoc, outliving all of the adults, would kill
two Romans and end Philonikos' life-before turning
the small, cheating blade on himself. With
constant repetition, he could feel the bite of the
blade through skin and muscle and on into his
heart. He could see the disappointment on the
faces of the enemy as they were deprived of their
prize and feel the blackness draw in and the face
of Briga grow more clear as he died. Even such
thoughts of defeat were better than the other,
greater fear that nagged at the borders of his
awareness: the cold, clinging question of how
his father was going to wield a blade in battle
when his prison-wrecked body could not properly 
wield an axe.

The ship remained at a distance. For each
hundred strides forward, it seemed a hundred
further away. The shoreline changed. Scattered
boulders more frequently littered the margins, the
same grey as the dusk so that the horses slowed,
picking their way. In time, rocky outcrops stretching for a hundred paces or more forced them
inland and hid the ship from view. At one such,
the path angled so sharply that, for a few strides,
Cunomar had a clear view of the decurion riding
behind. What he saw did not cheer him. Valerius
was drinking openly. He held his naked sword in
one hand, laying it across the neck of his mare,
and with the other he poured tavern wine into his
mouth.

The slave-boy rode double behind, clinging in
terror to his tunic. He was not a born rider, that
much was clear, but he had witnessed whatever
chastisement Valerius had visited on the obese
tavern-keeper and his fear of the man was far
greater than his fear of the horse. Cunomar
watched as Valerius reached back, offering the boy
a taste of his wine, and saw the urchin, terrified,
shake his head. Undeterred, the officer waved the
flask to the sides, offering it to invisible passersby.
His face was blandly still, beaded with sweat that
gathered in the dewdrop above his upper lip and
ran in runnels at his temples. It had been the same
each morning and evening as he drank steadily
beside the fire, causing deliberate offence to those
who rode with him. In the fourteen days of their
journey, Cunomar had learned to gauge the
progress of this man's inebriation. He judged him
barely conscious now.

'Do you think to escape the pain of battle, or to
find the courage to fight your own kind?'

His voice betrayed him. It broke in mid
Sentence so that while the beginning was deep and
resonant, the end piped high and shrill and far too
loud. On the ship they could have heard him, or
inland, where the Roman guards were seeking
their path. Cunomar felt his father turn sharply
and saw Dubornos lay a calming hand on
his arm and was grateful.

Valerius slewed sideways in his saddle to face
him. His gaze came eventually to rest on
Cunomar's face.

'If I did, there will be no escaping now, so you
had better hope I have found the courage as
you say. Or perhaps the god will stay Marullus'
hand long enough for words to do battle instead
of blades. You could pray for that.'

Valerius spoke quietly, his words barely carrying
over the waves. He did not sound drunk, but then
Cunomar had seen him finish an entire flagon
before this and not yet heard him slur a single
word.

The path widened between one outcrop and the
next. Cygfa rode forward to Cunomar's side, as
restraint, perhaps, or protection. Perversely,
Valerius rode up at his other side, coming so close
that the legs of the slave-boy riding behind him
brushed Cunomar's thigh. The tremor of fear
passed from one to the other, destroying the calm
of the sea.

From the left, Cygfa said, 'Do your ghosts warn
you now of your death, Roman?'

Valerius rolled his eyes in mock horror. 'Why
don't you ask them?'

'They don't speak to me.'

'No, of course not.' The decurion focused elsewhere on the night around them. 'They warn of
nothing yet. And my god promises success.'

'Is continued life all you need to judge success?

Valerius laughed aloud. The wine in him made
the sound less than controlled. Gathering himself
with some difficulty, he said, 'You have spent too
long on Mona, warrior, listening to the rhetoric of
your elders. Yes, at any other time than this, life
would be success enough. Only tonight, your
life and that of your family must also be preserved
for one to judge it victory.'

'And you think to do that through wine?'

'I will do it by whatever means are to hand.' The
man raised the flask, smiling. Behind it, his eyes
burned black with anger and unfathomable pain.
Cunomar, seeing it, understood then that Valerius
could have drunk any amount of wine in this
company and never been less than sober.

Dusk progressed towards night. The sun carved
indigo cracks in the cloud and lined them with
fire. Slowly, the refugees came closer to the ship.
At a certain point on the headland, Luain mac
Calma cupped his hands to his mouth and made
the sound of the hunting owl. It was well done,
but he might as easily have shouted; only a man born and bred in the city would believe that an
owl might hunt over the sea and Cunomar did not believe that Marullus, the centurion who tracked
them, was a soft city man.

On the ship, the signal was heard and answered
and all semblance of secrecy was gone. Lamps
flared to light in the half-dusk, casting a chain of
wavering fires onto the sea. One, burning more
brightly than the rest, began a slow, disjointed
progress up the rigging, carried by someone who
climbed one-handed and took good care in doing
so. When it was halfway up, it began to swing rhythmically from side to side. At this signal, a skiff set out from the ship's'side. It did not look big
enough to carry five adults, two youths and a babe, but Cunomar had no doubt it would seem bigger as he approached it. At any rate, it answered the question of how any or all of them might reach a ship standing eight spear-casts off
shore.

The skiff speared the water. The oars left foaming
trails of pale green light, showing its progress
like tracks in sand. It aimed straight for a projecting
spur of the headland that one could see was well within reach. Cunomar, watching it, felt a surge of hope such as he had not felt in two years of captivity. He turned to Cygfa, saying, 'The traitor's god may have given him-'

He stopped. The Romans hunting them, having
no need for secrecy, had not dragged their blades
in the mud. Far back inland, the dying sun drew
fire from the length of a gladius and showed up
the mass of moving shadows around it. Cunomar
choked.

Seeing his face, Cygfa spun her horse. Valerius
was faster. The wine flask dropped from his hand
and rolled on the turf. He spoke in Belgic, very
briefly, then in Eceni. 'Mac Calma, take the slave-boy. Ride for the skiff. I'll hold them.'

Caradoc answered. 'One man against nine? I
think not. The rocks here curve well and will
guard our backs and flanks. We will stand and
fight them as warriors. If we are to die, they will
remember us for it.'

He had led thousands in war. His voice could
contain them all, and protect them. Cunomar feltt the certainty of it, the courage and honour that was his birthright, and knew hope for a second
time, and a heady pride. The boy drew the blade
mac Calma had given him and felt the weight of it
drag at his arm. His hope faltered. Now it came to
it, he was not certain he could manage even a
single swing. He held the blade one-handed and
felt for his knife and knew that if the horse jigged
beneath him he would lose both and be taken alive
and if that happened his father, at least, would
stop fighting. It had happened before in the
imperial audience room and had cost his father
the use of his shoulder. Cunomar would not see it
happen again. He shifted both hands to the hilt of
the sword and rested the blade on the neck of his
horse as the decurion had done. Something inside
him melted, messily, and he feared for control of
his guts. The bound leather sword-grip slipped in
the sweat of his hands and it was all he could do
to keep it from falling.

Cygfa tapped his thigh. 'Get behind me. If I am
killed, or the horse dies beneath me, stay close to
mac Calma instead. If there is a chance, ride for
the skiff.'

Cygfa was fully alive now, so that, Cunomar
remembered truly who she had been on the morning
before the last battle when he had watched her
braid the barred feather into her hair with Braint.
He remembered, too, how he had felt and the
curses he had spoken. He felt something similar
now, but then envy had been a simple, unsullied
thing and now it was tainted by her clear care for
him and whatever he felt for her that he could not name. The crow feathers in her hair flew and spun
as she turned her head, catching his eye, the marks
of a warrior, which she had earned and he had
not. She did not mean to flaunt them, at least not
at him, but still a kernel of resentment glowed in
his chest, firing his resolve.

'No. I will fight at your left, as your shield.' He
smiled as he had seen his father smile before
battle. 'Trust me.'

For a long moment she stared at him, her eyes
strange, then said, 'Good. It's time you made your
kill, and if we are to cross to the other world in
Briga's care, it would be good if you came to her a
warrior.' She grinned as she had once done for
Braint and, for the first time, Cunomar understood the comradeship of battle; he loved her and
she loved him and they would fight the enemy as
equals, each protecting the other. A blossoming
joy merged with the fear so that he could not tel
which it was that choked him.

Cygfa said, 'If we're going to be shield-mates,
you must do as I say without question. Will you
swear to me now you will do so?'

He remembered an oath from long ago, sworn
on the head of his infant sister. He repeated it
word perfect and was pleased to see her eyes
widen. 'Very good.' He thought she looked
impressed. 'Then keep your horse's back to the
rock and don't dismount unless you have to. And
stay on my right, not my left. That place is yours
today.' She glanced past him and raised her arm.
'Philonikos! Bring your horse in here behind us.'

The youth came. He looked ill with fear.
Belatedly, at Cygfa's prompting, he drew his knife.
It shook in his hand. Cunomar smiled for him, as
he had for Cygfa. 'Their armour is weakest under
the arms,' he said, having heard it from his
mother. 'Stab for them there if you can. Or go for
the eyes.'

The boy nodded sickly. Cunomar marked again
in his mind the spot on the youth's chest where he
would have to stab to end his life cleanly when
they were overwhelmed.
The remaining warriors had brought their
horses in at his right hand with the rock to
their backs, each protecting the exposed flank of
the other except at the ends, to Cygfa's left and
Caradoc's right, where the rock curved round to
keep them safe. At the end of the line, Caradoc
swung his blade, testing the limit of his right
shoulder. When it was clear he would not be able
to fight that way, he moved his shield to the right
and swung his sword with the left. They learned
such things in the warriors' school on Mona, but
Cunomar did not think his father had learned it
well, and even if he had, the scars on his left wrist
made it weaker. Caradoc said something inaudible
to Cwmfen and she changed sides, coming to his
right. Like her daughter, she was whole and
supple, but the babe Math was strapped to her
back and hampered her movements.

Along the rest of the line, mac Calma and
Dubornos, dreamer and singer, stood together on
Caradoc's left. Dubornos asked, 'Will they have
archers?'

Valerius shook his head. 'Not unless they have
brought them from the town guard.'

Mac Calma said, 'There are no archers in
Gesoriacum.'

'But I can count more than nine in their line.
Your centurion has called on reinforcements from
somewhere.' Cygfa said this last and was right.
The enemy had slowed now, knowing themselves
seen. More than a dozen men strung out in a line
in the darkness, marked by starlit glimmers of
bronze and unsheathed iron.

Cunomar tried to count the exact number of
enemy blades and could not. The hilt of his own
sword still slipped in the running sweat of his
palms. He gripped it with both hands and
repeated to himself the oath he had sworn to
Cygfa. All warriors felt fear, his father had told
him so; the test of true courage was to fight in
spite of it, not in its absence. The thrill of absolute
terror vibrated in his chest and he swore to himself
in Briga's name that he would die a warrior, true
to his heritage.

The advancing line was close enough to see the
detail of the enemy armour, if not their insignia.
Dubornos, squinting, said, 'I can count eight more
besides the nine that have followed us. The new
ones are Gaulish cavalrymen.' He glanced sideways
at Valerius. 'You were with the Gauls when you
forced the salmon-trap, were you not? Maybe
they've sent your old troop against you.'

Valerius was stiffly white. The thought,
apparently, was not new to him. 'Maybe they
have,' he said.

He was not part of their group but had placed
himself in front and to the left. In the tribes, only
one resolved to stand and fight in single combat -or to die - would do so. As if remembering late
these two alternatives, he spoke sharply in Belgic
to the slave-boy riding behind him, who shook his
head, clutching the back of the man's tunic more
tightly. Valerius lifted his arm as if to hit him and
stopped suddenly, staring out into the night. He let
the arm fall.

'Stay if you will,' he said, and then, 'That's the
Cockerel on the standard, not the Pegasus. These
are not the Quinta Gallorum. He's brought a
detail of the town guard.' The relief was audible to
them all, and the spare, unvaunted courage as
Valerius pushed his horse forward. 'Now would
be a good time to pray that Marullus truly has
brought no archers.'

He stopped in full view of the enemy, raised his
hand in a cavalry salute and shouted.

'Marullus!'

The strength of his voice was astonishing. It was
clear that he had fought on battlefields where an
officer might need to be heard at a distance, shouting
to his own men or, as here, calling the name of
the man who led his enemies.

'Marullus!' He shouted a second time and the
name hung clear as beaten bronze in the silence.

The enemy halted, granting him the honour of a
hearing. No arrows fell from the night to punish
his impudence.

As if speaking from a memorized text, Valerius
said, 'Father! Greetings in the name of the Slain
Bull and the Raven. A son should not oppose his
Father, nor be opposed. I wish you no ill but I am
under oath to god and emperor. Let their will be
done.'

Marullus' voice was deeper and it, too, had
known war. It shook the chests of all those who
heard it, as Neptune's might. It was not unkind.
'The god's will is unknowable but the emperor has
named you traitor. His will is law. You will die
now or later. Better for you that it be now.'

Traitor. Mac Calma had said it already but it
had more certainty now. The word drifted like
snow in the night, coming down again and again
on those who stood waiting with their backs to the
sea and the last taste of freedom. One could
imagine the death Rome offered a traitor, and fear
it.

Valerius' voice was steady. 'Who is emperor?'

'Nero, sworn successor to Claudius. You kno
that. You saw the black smoke,of the lighthouse
fire.'

They had all seen it. Even Cunomar had known
it signalled their certain doom. The decurion had
been alone in believing otherwise.

Still casting his voice to the dark, Valerius
shouted, 'My orders were taken in good faith from
a living man. If his successor wished to countermand them, he had only to send word.'

'He tried. You cut the throat of the bearer who
had tracked you for two days to deliver exactly
those orders to you in person.'

Valerius fell silent. In his lack of words was
Cygfa's unvoiced accusation. See? You killed
without need. No true warrior does so.

Mac Calma knew nothing of the slain
messenger. Breaking the silence, he said quietly,
'Thank you. They will not turn back now but you
have done your best and we are grateful. There is
still time for you to leave. The track to the west
is clear and leads to villages where there are
those who do not support Rome. I think they
will not follow you when they have us penned
here.'

Valerius laughed harshly. 'And where would I
go? If I am named traitor in Rome and Gaul, then
as much so in Britannia. The Prima Thracum has
no use for an officer who has committed treason
against his emperor. It seems the god has spoken
and he no longer promises success. Perhaps in the
afterworld, he will explain why.'

He looked out into the night. He ran his sword
along the crook of his elbow, wiping the blade free
of mud so that the rising moon and the stars raised
a glimmer on the surface. Raising it, he shouted a
final time, 'Your choice, Marullus! We will test the
son against the Father.'

More quietly to those around him, as if ordering
his cavalry troop, he said, 'Be ready. The rock
prevents them from attacking the flanks and so
they will send half the Gaulish auxiliaries as a
spear-head to force a breach in the centre then
come at us in line abreast. If the spear-head works
and you are split into two groups, form circles
with your backs to the centre and the weakest
inside. Keep as close as you can to the rock; it will
act as a shield.'

He raised his blade in salute and his face held
the same dry, wine-fuelled mockery he had maintained
for their two weeks of journey. To any and
all he said, 'Good luck. If your gods still listen,
pray to them now for a clean death in battle. We
are outnumbered by more than three to one. It
should not take long.'

However much they loathed him, they could
not call him a coward. In the moments before the
two lines closed, Cunomar heard him speaking
aloud in a tongue that was neither Eceni, nor Latin
nor Gaulish. To untrained ears, it sounded like a
litany of names, spoken in defiance. At the end he
heard three spoken hard in Eceni, as a summoning.
The last of them was the hound's name,
Hail.

With bitter vehemence, Valerius cursed the many
names of his god in the tongue of the eastern magi
who had first brought him to men. He did not
want to die. He did not want to face the ghosts
without Mithras' protection. He did not want to
fight against Marullus, whom he respected as
much as any officer of the legions and more than
most He particularly did not want to fight and die
in the company of Caradoc of the Three Tribes
who may or may not have betrayed him and of
Luain mac Calma who may or may not have sired
him. If he had to do all these things, then he
wanted a shield, badly, and the company of
Longinus Sdapeze who, alone of all men, could
still settle him before battle, could make him laugh
and set impossible wagers that made the business
of war seem less brutal and more of a game.

Mithras did not answer the curses any more
than he had answered the day's prayers. He sent
seventeen trained men against five adults and two
children and it was not a game. Valerius was
grateful only for the mare; he had picked her himself
from the emperor's stables before he left Rome
and she was battle trained to a standard even
Longinus would have appreciated. In the stretch
of time before the first clash of iron, Julius
Valerius, who had once been Ban of the Eceni,
called in the ghosts that judged him most harshly,
challenging them to stay with him until he died.

The Gauls came in a spear-head to break the
centre as he had said they would. Valerius held
the mare back until the first had crossed blades
with Caradoc and then launched in from the side,
acting as his own one-man wedge to break their
group. It was not an orthodox manoeuvre, but it
was what an officer would do. He would not have
it said later by Marullus that he had acted either
rashly or without courage. As the mare plunged
forward, he heard the Belgic boy squeal in terror
and offered a quite different prayer to the god, of
regret for a child's needless' dying.

He killed the first of the enemy on a reflex,
striking the unprotected throat of a man who
would kill a weaponless slave-boy simply because
he was an easy kill and only afterwards, as the
body fell away from him, did he see that it was a
Roman, not a Gaul, whose life he had ended and
that he knew the man. It was too late by then for
regret; regret led to death and his body would not
allow it.

Wrenching his horse away from another slicing
blade, Valerius passed Cygfa, who killed as one
born to it, keeping Cunomar safe at her side and
Philonikos behind her. Breaking the sword arm of
a Gaul for her, he heard her shout to Cunomar,
'That one is yours!' and turned back in time to see
the man use his shield to batter aside the boy's
powerless stroke and thrust the boss on throu
for his face. It was a killing blow, aimed to crush
skull and vertebrae to the marrow. Valerius' sword
moved in a line of its own making, slicing up
beneath the tilt of the man's helmet into the only
unarmoured space that would ensure a kill.

The shield dropped from nerveless fingers, missing the boy's face by less than a hand's breadth.
The Gaul toppled from the saddle. Valerius saw
Cunomar's mouth contort in a scream that may
equally have been despair or hatred or, less
probably, thanks, but heard nothing. The noise of
battle was already too great, to hear one voice
above many. Other Gauls attacked from the sides
and a boy's missed chance of glory mattered not at
all.

The defenders killed and took wounds but none
died. The rocks protected their backs and sides so
that the enemy could only come from the front.
In that much, Marullus had misjudged them, or
had not thought to send scouts ahead to check the
terrain. Valerius knew a blossoming hope until, in
a moment of quiet, he heard the clatter of scattering
shingle, like rain on a roof, and, looking to his
right, saw a fresh body of horsemen riding hard
from the west, the side away from the town. They
blocked all chance that any of the defenders might
slip back from the battle line and run for the skiff,
which was doubtless why they were there.

The officer in him admired Marullus' tactics
afresh even while he sought to counter them. The
mare spun back of her own accord. Two men
came at him, one on either side, and Valerius
pulled on her soft mouth, hurting her, taking her
up and out of reach. He felt the sudden draught on
the small of his back and knew the slave-boy had
fallen away and was sorry. He killed the first man
and found that Luain mac Calma had taken the
second. The dreamer should not have been there;
he was needed elsewhere. In the knot of warriors
that held both Caradoc and Dubornos, Valerius
could hear the false ring of iron on at least one
weak blade. When he took time to look, he could
see that Cwmfen had moved her horse closer to
Caradoc's right, shielding him, and that the
warrior was visibly tiring. He had no love for any
of those who fought with him, but if their deaths
were to be entwined, he did not want it sooner
than he could help.

Marullus' second line of men moved in.
Breaking a thrust spear - the Gauls had spears! -Valerius shouted to mac Calma, 'See to Caradoc. I
am well.'

'Then get the boy back and ride for the skiffs. It
is you they are trying to kill, not us.'

It was true. The brunt of the Roman attack was
aimed against him. Only the dangerous shifting
shingle of the beach and the warriors on either
side stopped them from overwhelming him. In
the mayhem, the dreamer shouted again, 'Get the
boy!' His blade danced right and left, making
space about them. His hair and his cloak flagged
in the wake of his turns. 'Ride for the skiffs, man!'

'Can't ... new troop of Gauls in the way...
death to move from here.'

'No. They're our Gauls ... friends ...' A blade
cut the flank of mac Calma's horse and the beast
reared, flailing, spoiling the killing stroke. The
dreamer slashed back in his own right. Iron belled
on iron. There was a chance he might live, which
was more than could be said for the others.

Caradoc was wounded. Valerius could see from
the way his horse moved that his right hand no
longer controlled the reins. He pulled away from
mac Calma. Our Gauls? Impossible. All Gauls
were sworn to the emperor and Rome. A blade
streaked across at eye height and the impossibility
of Gaulish allies would have killed him if he had
thought about it more.

Thinking kills. Unthinking, he knocked his
attacker from his horse and then reached low from
the saddle to slice the man's leg below the chain mail, leaving the great vessel spewing blood and
his enemy clutching his last moments of life. Is life less precious to the grown man who understands what he has to lose ...?  I think not. He was
becoming detached so that a part of him floated
above the battle, watching and judging. As always
at such times, the ghosts had gone, which was
unfair; if Valerius were going to die, he wanted
them there to witness it. Savagely, he called them
back and his heart rejoiced when they came.

Instinct pulled him to the right-hand end of the
line to where Caradoc had slid from his horse and
was fighting side by side with Cwmfen, using his
body to guard Math, who was strapped to her
back. Dubornos was wounded but still used his
sword to good effect. He knelt at Cwmfen's side,
lacking the use of one leg. Weakened and without
shields and proper armour, none of the three could
live long.

Valerius was about to dismount and join them
when a shield grazed the knuckles of his left hand,
the grip pressing into his palm. He had swung his
blade halfway to the side before he understood
and slowed its arc. He took his eyes off the enemy
long enough to look down and found the Belgic
boy, who had neither ridden nor sailed but who
might, once, have seen battle, or heard of it
around a fire in the winter in the days when he
was free. The boy smiled and was, indeed, Iccius,
who had died in a hypocaust. The pain in Valerius'
chest might have been enough to kill him had not
a ringing, many-voiced battle cry from the west
jerked his mind away from the past.

Our Gauls. A dozen horsemen charged at a full
gallop into the chaos. They bore spears and long
swords and good shields and, screaming to their
gods, they carved into the Roman auxiliaries as
blades into meat. In a single pass, five of the
enemy died. Our Gauls. Warriors still loyal to
Mona and the old gods, who would risk their lives
in defence of a dreamer who travelled often to
Gaul and those who rode with him.

Our Gauls. Mithras! I thank you.

The slave-boy was standing in frozen stillness
among the plunging horses. In Belgic, Valerius
shouted, 'Give me your arm. Come up on my
horse. They must know you are one of us.'

The boy clutched at his sleeve and was hauled up.
He weighed less than Iccius had ever done, even
after Amminios had gelded him.

A loose horse passed, foaming white at the
mouth, its eyes wide with fear. Valerius grabbed
the reins and tore it round, bracing his weight
against it. Dragging it beside his mare, he forced a
way forward. Behind him, the slave-boy
whimpered once and was silent.

On the ground, Caradoc was holding his blade
two-handed, carving air, but not cleanly. Valerius
used the free mount bodily to block a Roman
attacker. Thrusting the reins forward, he shouted, 'For you! There's a chance now. Mount if you
want to live.'

The warrior's reply broke apart in the chaos.
'No ... Dubornos has ... greater need.'

The second wave of the incomers was on them,
attacking at random. Valerius ducked and slashed
and realized late that he had not forgone his
decurion's armour and was beset by those who
were ostensibly his allies. Mac Calma shouted
violently in Gaulish and the strikes against him
lessened. In the cramped space in front of the
rocks, Gauls fought other Gauls and only by
the blue-stained heron feathers flying in handfuls
from the hair of the newcomers could friends be
told from foe. Marullus' Romans were pushed to
the margins and, not knowing what to look for,
did not see the distinction, and so could not kill.

'Get to the boat!' It was mac Calma, singing his
single litany.

Light-headed with fatigue, Valerius laughed.
'You need a new chant, dreamer.'

He swung round. Dubornos mounted the
gelding he had caught. His leg was bleeding, but
not broken. Two horses were brought, one each
for Caradoc and Cwmfen. Cygfa joined them,
white-faced and cursing, shepherding a raging
Cunomar who wanted to kill even if he died trying
to achieve it. A pack of howling, blue-feathered
Gauls surrounded them and escape seemed
possible, but for the sudden crash of the falling sky
as Marullus, who had kept clear of the fray to give
orders, now, at the last, committed himself and
came crashing through.

'Go!' Valerius screamed it in his battle voice, in
Eceni, as he had never screamed before. 'Go for
the ship. Marullus is mine. To get me, he will let
you go.'

There was no time to see if he was obeyed. The
centurion was a bull, inward and outward, and he
swatted Gauls as a bull crushes summer flies and
with as little care. Men fell before him and around
him as he ploughed his horse through the battle
lines to get to the man he had called son, whose
life he had chosen not to take these past fourteen
days.

The stolen shield saved Valerius. The first blow
of the centurion's blade cracked it, but did not
break through. The power of the strike numbed
his arm. The second swiped sideways for his head
and he might have died but the mare slipped on
the blood-slick shingle, going down on one knee
and the sweep of the blade missed them both. She
was a good mare. Valerius heard her grunt as
she rose and knew the bone had broken in her
forelimb, or the tendons split. One last time, he
dragged hard on her mouth and she gave him
what he needed, rising high on her hind legs. The
Belgic boy slipped backward to safety. The mare
caught the backswing of Marullus' blade, taking it
full in the side of the head, splitting bone and
muscle down to the teeth. She screamed hoarsely
and toppled. Crimson blood spumed from her
nose. The sword wedged, in her, held fast in the
bone, and the centurion, loath to let go, was
pulled off balance. Valerius was already clear,
dropping the shield, rolling on the shingle, bruising
the entirety of his back, rising with his blade
still in his hand. Longinus would have liked that.
Longinus would never hear of it. Marullus was
above him, still in his saddle, still off balance,
bellowing.

Knowing himself lost for all time to the god and
the legions, Julius Valerius Corvus, first decurion
of the Prima Thracum, struck into the unguarded
face of the man who had branded him, who had
taught him the litanies, who had given him a
reason to live when there was none. Marullus
died, despising him, and was added to the ghosts.
A shout in Latin recorded it and the Romans on
the margins of the chaos, seeing him die,
abandoned their discretion. No longer attempting
to discern friend from foe, they began instead to
attack every Gaul within reach. On the pebbles of
the shoreline, the mare died, thrashing.

'Come!'

It was shouted in Gaulish and repeated in Eceni.
A hand dragged on Valerius' sword arm, pulling
him along beside a running horse. Other hands
caught him under the armpit and he was raised up
and thrown bodily on the back of a mount. The
battle fell behind and behind and he dragged himself
upright and took control of the reins and saw
the Belgic boy held safe by Dubornos and was glad
it was not Caradoc and then they were on the spit
of land with the rocks and the seaweed and the
pinpoint barnacles lit fire-bright by the oarsmen's
lamps. Only because he  could ride no further,
Valerius braced himself against the saddle, ready
to dismount. His mind would not allow him to
consider where he might go when his feet met the
beach.

'You're not coming!'

Surprised, he looked up. His new horse was
footsore and had trouble on the wet rock and
turned only slowly. Before it was fully round, he
had realized that it was Cygfa who had spoken
and that she was weeping. She would never weep
for him.

From over his right shoulder he heard Caradoc's
voice, held unnaturally steady, say, 'I can't come.
I'm sorry, truly. I can't, not like this.' The warrior's
right arm hung at his side. It might still have
movement, but it would never again raise a shield.

'You must. The warriors of Mona, of the
Ordovices, of all the united tribes, will accept you,
whole or not. You can still come. You must.
Without you, we are nothing.' She was whispering,
to get the words out past her grief. They
hushed into the sea.

'No. They may accept, but they will not
respect.' Caradoc spread his left hand. The fingers
crooked inwards on both and they shook as one
with palsy. 'Cygfa, I don't do this to hurt you, I
swear it. If we were not at war, I would return
without hesitation, but I can't lead a battle as I
am. Better that they know I am free and in Gaul
and that they believe me whole. It will be said I
stayed to fight while you escaped. Word will be
spread later that I am alive and it will give heart
where my presence will not. I'm sorry.' It was a
prepared speech, as Valerius' to Marullus had
been. One could not tell how long ago he had
prepared it.

The dreamers, evidently, expected this..
Dubornos showed no surprise. Luain mac Calma
took no part in the exchange taking place an arm's length away and instead watched the skiff on one
side and the battle beyond, where a line of Gauls
was slaughtering the remnants of Marullus' men.

Cygfa said, 'Mother? Will you not return to
your people?'

Cwmfen was behind Caradoc. Enemy blood
stained her face and arms, but no tears. She shook
her head. 'I stay with your father. Math must grow
knowing his father as well as his mother. He needs
both of us to teach him who he is and what lines
he has come from. It is better like this. We will
hear word of you and you of us.'

'Then I'll stay with you. I'll guard you and my
brother will grow knowing his full family.' She did
not suggest that Cunomar should stay.

'No.' Caradoc reached for her arm. 'You must
sit your long-nights. Mac Calma says it's not too
late, but that it can't be done in Gaul. The gods no
longer live here as they do on Mona.'

Valerius watched the change in her, the sudden
swamping wave of a hope that had been buried so
deeply for so long that she had forgotten it was
there. Her father had not forgotten, nor her
mother, and nor, perhaps, had Luain mac Calma,
who could see what she might have been and
might yet be. The understanding of that filled her
visibly.

She glanced sideways at the dreamer, who
nodded. Caradoc smiled, at what cost was not
clear. 'See? It is better this way. Go now. You must
sail and we must ride.'

He reached for her other arm, no longer the
clasp of a warrior but the full embrace of father
for daughter. The careful mask of his composure
broke open. Tears made clean tracks on his
cheeks. His hand went to his shoulder, to the
serpent-spear brooch that was all that remained of
Britannia. He unhooked it and pinned it to
Cygfa's tunic. The red threads on the lower loop
were entirely blackened with his blood. Kissing
her, he said, 'I have no blade to give you - mac
Calma will see one is made for you that is fit. Take
this, and take heart. While you live, my soul and
your mother's fight the enemy through you.'

'Father ...' Cygfa lifted his hand to her cheek.
Through streaming tears she said, 'We will drive
them from the land, every one. Then you can come
home again.'

Caradoc smiled brokenly. When he could speak,
he said, 'We will wait daily for that news.'

His gaze moved back beyond Cygfa to where
Cunomar watched, forlorn, abandoned, unspeakably
angry and lost. He had entered the
battle a boy and emerged the same, lacking a
single kill. Until Caradoc spoke, all of his
attention had been on the fighting behind them.
Valerius, watching, saw that Dubornos was holding
the boy's horse and that three of the
blue-feathered Gauls had been ordered expressly
to watch over the lad and keep him safe.

'Cunomar, you fought well.' Caradoc was more
controlled now, enough to pass off a lie with some
credibility. He drew the knife from his belt and
held it, hilt out. 'I have no sword to give you, but
take this, as if it were one. Mac Calma will see it
made real.' He stopped, searching for words.
Those that came were not prepared. 'Your mother
... your mother will know this is right. Stand at
her side in my stead. Protect her for me.'

He knew his son well. The boy's face had
collapsed at the sight of the knife and the hollow
praise for his actions. In the name of his mother,
he pulled himself together and sat straighter in the
saddle. For the first time, he took his eyes and his
attention completely from the fading battle at the
rocks. He had been born on Mona and grown
amongst its ceremony. He made the salute of a
warrior to a member of the elder council, perfectly.

'While I live, she will not take harm,' he said. 'In
Briga's name, I swear it.'

The gathered adults witnessed the oath with due
solemnity.

Their parting was swift after that. The Gauls
took the horses. The oarsmen, who were for the best park also Gauls, helped the warriors to board the skiff. Philonikos chose to accompany Caradoc and was wished well by Dubornos, who had been
closest to him. The Belgic boy, wretchedly confused, was given the same choice and, perhaps not understanding, said in his fractured Gaulish that
he wished to remain with Valerius, wherever he went. Where Valerius was going was not clear to
any of them, least of all the man himself.

Mac Calma made the decision for him. 'If you
stay, our Gauls will kill you. They don't believe me that you are not of Rome.'

'They're right. I'm as much of Rome as any man they killed tonight.'

The dreamer smiled crookedly. 'Then if you
wish to die, you may stay on this beach. If you wish to live, you can at least board the boat. We have five days' journey, perhaps more. Decisions can be made and broken a dozen times in each day, and if you really want to die
Manannan will take you.' When Valerius did not
reply, mac Calma said, 'If you stay, the boy Iccius
will die with you. I do not have the power to make
them let him live.'

It was the name that made the difference, although later Valerius railed against so flagrant an abuse of his past. At the time, he knew only
that he could not see the child die again whose
ghost he still carried with him and so the decision was made.

'Stop.' Valerius had turned to board the skiff when Caradoc grasped his arm. It was easy now to
see the man in him; the god had never looked so
broken. The cloud-grey eyes were bloodshot and
held a world of pain. The courage it took to
keep them level could not be measured. Caradoc
held out his hand. 'Give me your knife,' he said.

'What?'

'Your knife. The one with the falcon head. Give it to me.'

Waves brushed the shingle. A night gull cried.
An oarsman grated his blade on the sand. Slowly,
Valerius drew his knife from his belt and held it
out on the flat of his palm.

Caradoc touched the shaking fingers of his left
hand to the weapon but did not lift it. He said, 'There is a challenge amongst my mother's people, the Ordovices, to test the truth between warriors.
Two hands clasp the knife-hilt. Each strives to
strike the other in the throat. Only one walks
away alive.'

Valerius barked a laugh. 'The Ordovices were
always known for their savagery.'

'Perhaps, but it has its place. I swear to you
now, on the hilt of your blade, that I did not
betray you to Amminios, that I never at any time
in your childhood wished you ill, that I took joy in
your joy and heart in your love, that I respected
the power of the dreamer you were and the
warrior you could become. I would have spoken
willingly before the elders at your long-nights and
felt myself honoured to be asked. I still would.'
Caradoc was neither a dreamer nor a singer but his words carried their power. His eyes burned.
They were not the god's eyes. In a different voice,
he said, 'If you doubt me, we will take the
challenge. Mac Calma is not empowered by our
elders to oversee it, but Cwmfen is.'

'You think she wishes to oversee your slaughter?' The mere suggestion was ludicrous.
Valerius was weary from the battle, but not incapacitated.
Caradoc was on his feet only because
his will would not let him fall; he waz in no
condition to hold a knife. Valerius said, 'You have
the chance of life in Gaul. Do you wish to leave
Cwmfen to rear a child without its father? That is
not what you just told your daughter.'

'I would not have my son grow to adulthood
with his father accused of treachery.'

'Worse things have been said of men.'

'Not of me.'

They stood apart on the shingle, with a knifeblade
between them. Behind, the battle ended.

Valerius heard a man die, and then the silence of 
spent warriors who will stand a while when the
danger is over, until they can find the strength to
walk. He had seen it on both sides, sometimes in
the same day, when the battle has gone beyond the
endurance of everyone left on the field and no-one
can win.

Caradoc said gently, 'Ban? You have to choose,
You can't go back to Breaca believing that I
betrayed you.'

Your sister is my heart and soul, the rising of my
sun in the morning. She has been from the first
meeting and will be until I die and beyond.

The child who had been Ban had not seen that.
The man who was Valerius had spent fifteen years
denying it.

Valerius closed his hand around the knife's hilt.
Slowly, he removed it from Caradoc's grip. 'You
think I could go within reach of my sister if
I had killed you? She must have changed a great
deal.'

'She hasn't.' Caradoc smiled. 'Then you believe
me?' 

You would believe Amminios over me?

Yes.

He could lie so well, my brother ...

'I won't kill you to prove a point.'

Fingers stronger than he imagined closed on his
wrist, crushing skin onto bone. Cloud-grey eyes
burned with a fire he had thought long spent.
With quiet intensity, Caradoc said, 'But do you
believe me?'

The ghosts were gone. His god did not watch
over him. Alone in a crowd of strangers with noone
left to help him, Julius Valerius abandoned the
certainty that had sustained him since before he
joined the legions.

'Yes,' he said, 'I believe you.'

XXVII.

'It's a ship!'

The gale whipped the words out over the sea. It
caught the unbraided parts of Breaca's hair and
spread them like sea-wrack about her face. It lifted
spray from the waves and dashed it onto the rocks
at her feet, and over the fire, and her cloak, and
her face, and she raised her arms and let it cover
all of her, saltily sweet. Laughing like a child, she
shouted to Airmid over the noise of the wind and
the water. 'Look! Near where the sun hits the sea.
It's a ship. Graine was right. It's Luain's ship!'

She had not believed the dream; no-one had. It
had come early one morning, halfway through the
first of the autumn's storms. Graine had told it to
Sorcha who had waited almost to noon before, at
the child's insistence, she had walked through the
rain to the great-house and told whoever would
listen. The first few had smiled and laid more
wood on the fire and done nothing; a young
child's dreams are too unfocused to be true and no
sane man would sail in the face of an autumn
storm. Airmid alone had believed her and had
persuaded Ardacos to take the ferry across to the
mainland to search for Breaca and bring her
home.

The small warrior had taken three days to find
the Boudica and another half day passed before
she was persuaded to abandon her stalking of
foraging legionaries on the strength of a dream
told by the daughter she had barely seen these last
two years. The promise of a ship had swayed her,
and Airmid's word that the dream was true.

Airmid had been waiting on the jetty for their
return, carrying lit torches, with the horses
saddled behind. Graine waited with her, standing
on her own, no longer needing to hold an adult
hand for support. Breaca could not remember
when that had happened; sometime in the summer
perhaps.

Graine was wearing a grey cloak- and a small
dreamer's thong at the brow, That, too, was new.
Her ox-blood hair hung in sodden rats' tails
around her shoulders, darkened to oak in the rain.
Seeing Sorcha, she had run forward to be lifted
and swung in the air, squealing. Set down on the
ground again, she took a step towards her mother,
then, faltering, looked back to Airmid for help.

'Go on.' The dreamer had smiled quiet encouragement.
'Say what you dreamed.'

The child took a breath. Slowly, measuring the
words, she said, 'Luain-the-heron is on the boat
that's coming. He brings our brothers with him.'

It was an easy mistake. Graine was less than
quarter year past her third birthday. Her words
were good, better than they had been in the
summer, but they were no more precise than her
dreaming. The difference between a brother and  a
father was not great either in dreaming or in
language.

Airmid, standing behind, had shrugged. 'She's
been saying that since she first dreamed it,'
she said. 'I promised I'd let her tell you.'

'It's a kind dream, thank you.' Smiling, Breaca
had knelt and opened her arms. Graine came into
them, shyly, as if to a stranger, and they hugged, a
mess of wet wool and rain-blackened hair.
Manannan, god of the sea, sent a wave to wash
over the jetty and their feet. Breaca stood, lifting
her daughter in her arms, and kissed the top of her
head. 'Thank you for coming out in the rain. If
you stay here with Ardacos now, he'll give you dry
clothes and keep you warm and Airmid and
Sorcha and I will ride west to the coast and see
who's on the boat. If Cunomar's there, we'll bring
him back to you. He'll be glad to be home, and
your father with him.'

The child's great green-grey eyes had been
solemnly wide, like an owl's. 'You're not to be angry
with him,' she said. 'The grandmother said so.'

Breaca could not imagine being angry. It was
enough to stand on the brink of hope, like a child
on the edge of a winter torrent, not daring to step
forward. For nearly three years she had known
that Caradoc, Cwmfen and the children were alive
in Rome, but nothing more, until Luain mac
Calma had read something in the flight of a heron
and heard something else from a passing Greek
trader and had taken a late ship for Gaul. Breaca
stood now, braced against the wind, with the
spray from the sea fierce on her face and hands
and felt her heart swell to bursting in her chest as
the same vessel fought the swell of the waves to
bring him home.

Sorcha stood with her, and Airmid. Both of
them saw the ship now, and watched its progress.
Sorcha alone- knew how well it fared. The ferrywoman
was their link with the sea and all that
sailed on it. 

'That's the Sun Horse,' she said, 'Segoventos'
ship. He knows this coastline as well as I do but
the wind's too strong for him to come inshore. We
should take the small boat out and meet them.'

Breaca said, 'Is that safe?'

Sorcha grinned. 'I don't know. It's safer than if
mac Calma tries to row the ship's boat in to shore
but that doesn't mean we won't drown. It's your
choice. We could wait here for the wind to die
down but it could be next spring before that happens.
I didn't think you'd want to wait that long.'

It was good to hear someone who could still
laugh. Airmid was silent, as she had been since
they left the forests and came within sight of the
sea. Her gaze rested on the western horizon far
beyond the ship where the sun lowered itself to 
rest on the low mountains of Hibernia. Breaca laid
a hand on her shoulder. When it was acknowledged, she asked, 'Did you dream with Graine? Is
that how you knew it was true?'

'No. Your daughter dreams alone now. But the
ancestor-dreamer visited while we were riding; we
passed over one of her resting places. She is bound
to us now and we to her, whatever happens. She
would have us both know that the threads of the
serpent-brooch are weaving in the way that we
asked for.'

The wind did not lessen, but it seemed as if it did.
In a bubble of quiet, Breaca said, 'Sorcha, thank you
for your offer. We'll take the small boat. You're
right; I don't think I could wait until spring.'

Waves swamped them and the wind pushed their
boat hard to the north. They rowed against both
and moved at less speed than the sun in the sky. In
time, sodden and shaking and sick from the swell,
they came alongside the ship. Airmid jumped to
catch the rope that was thrown them. Luain mac
Calma raised them up, with help from Segoventos,
ship's master, merchant seaman, and spy.

Airmid went first, and then Sorcha. Breaca, who
had faced death in battle more times than it was
possible to count, struggled to find the courage to
join them; there had been a pain in not knowing,
but it was bearable. Graine's words rushed at her,
carried on the wind and the waves. You're not to
be angry with him. Only now, when it was too late
for answers, did she think to ask with whom she
might be angry and why. Feeling a nausea that had
nothing to do with the sea, she wound the rope
round her waist, lifted the free end, and held on.

The ship's sides were steep and slick with weed.
The first pull of the rope stripped the skin from
her hands and wrenched her arms. Mac Calma
looped the rope on a roundel and used it to winch
her ever higher. She came over the edge of the deck
and was hauled in by sea-strong hands. A gaggle
of strangers waited to greet her, with Airmid on
their margin. Gold hair, made wet by the waves,
stood out amongst darker reds and browns.
Scanning them too fast, Breaca searched for
known faces and, slowly, they emerged: the
haggard features of the children who were no
longer children and had just survived four days at
sea in a storm. In that first look, she saw no-one
adult and only one child that she recognized.

'Cunomar?' She crouched, finding her balance
on the deck, and held open her arms. As Graine
had done, her son came forward stiffly, a stranger
to her as she was to him. He kissed her cheek
formally and held out a dagger, balancing the
blade across his palms. 'Father sent me with this,'
he said. 'If you make it into a sword, I can go into
battle. When we have killed all the Romans, he
can come home again.'

There was quiet, and a tension as if too many of
those around her had held their breath for too
long. Breaca searched the faces of the strangers
again, fighting panic.
A tall young woman with corn-gold hair pushed
forward from the group. 'Father's injured. He
couldn't come; the warriors wouldn't have
followed him. He sent you this, with his love-'

The words spilled out, like barley poured from the
hand. She held out a brooch, dulled by the sea.
The two-headed serpent coiled back on itself,
looking to past and to future. The spear made an
angled path across it, showing the many ways to
go. At its base, looped in the coils of the snake,
two threads hung blackly.

Breaca stood, staring and not seeing, her mind
frozen on the point of knowing. Someone -Dubornos, perhaps, if Dubornos could be so thin,
and so lame - said, 'Breaca? He couldn't come. It
was the right choice. He's alive and he'll return when
he can. He'll get word to you in the meantime. For
now, there is someone else you should meet.'

The world descended into madness. The storm
made black the afternoon sky and the dying sun
flared beneath. Westerly winds slammed ship
and sea together, so that the deck heaved and
bucked and simply to stand was hard enough. To
stand and to understand and to believe and not
to break was impossible. Airmid was holding her,
one hand firm on her wrist. Luain mac Calma
stood on her other side, leaning into her shoulder
to keep her upright. The man who had spoken - it
was Dubornos, scarred almost beyond recognition
- stepped to one side so that what he had been
hiding might be exposed to the sulphurous
sunlight and to Breaca's sight.

She thought she was dreaming truly then, and
that Luain mac Calma both stood at her side and
lay on the deck-bed, greenly pale with sickness.
Then she looked again and it was Macha, grown
leaner and harder and eaten alive with an anger
that soured her soul. Then she looked a third time,
and it was neither of these, but the eyes that stared
into hers, alight with rage and fear and a
desperate, aching wish to die, were quite black,
resonantly so, the colour of charcoal, or a crow's
wing at the shoulder, where the colour is most
dense--

'Ban?' 

A wave slammed at the ship, rocking it. Salt
water sprayed her hair and her face, scouring the
skin. Further out towards Hibernia, a single gull cried, a sound like a child 'or a lost soul, wandering.
On the deck, nobody moved. Friends and strangers waited, watching the sea. In other
worlds, a grandmother sighed, or laughed, or
wept; they were all the same and all lost in the
storm.

The man lying sheltered on the deck-bed smiled,
wryly, as if at a private joke. Slowly, taking care
for unseen injuries, he pushed himself onto one
elbow. The move was consciously Roman; no man
of the tribes would lean so. 'Caradoc said the same, just like that.' He spoke in Latin and that,
too, was deliberate. His eyes sought hers for the
first time, and held them. A dark irony, and pity,
sparked in their depths. 'You are very alike. Did
you want to know that?'

She was alone, deserted by everything that made
the world safe. 'Are you Ban?' she asked again.

'Not any longer.' The smile hung on his face,
forgotten. He looked down and studied his hands.

'I may have been once. More recently, I have been
Julius Valerius, decurion of the first troop, First Thracian Cavalry. Now, I am no-one. If you need
answers, ask mac Calma. This is his doing. I have
no doubt he understands it better than you or I
will ever do.'

He brings our brothers. Graine had said so, one
quarter year past her third birthday and Breaca
had dared to presume that a child's uncertain
dreaming could not distinguish between one love
and the other. You are not to be angry with him.
Think of Ban. He is the red and the black. Trust me.

She was sick. It had been a long time coming
and she had ignored it. Airmid held her, guiding
her to the stern so she could lean out over the
ocean and not soil the deck. Cygfa, recognizable
now through the changes of age and battle and
hardship, brought her rainwater and a sponge to
clean her face. Breaca drank some of the water
and spat it out, washing the salt and sick from her
teeth. Standing, she took the bowl and emptied it
over her head. The sudden deluge did not make
her any wetter, that would have been impossible,
but the shock brought her back to herself, cold
and vividly angry.

There was no hope. There never had been; at
heart, she had known it. Instead, there was a
world of care and killing and the refuge of anger
and a man who lay on a deck-bed wearing
the uniform of a Roman cavalry officer. Not two
days since, she had killed a decurion who wore its
twin, but the dead man had not worn at his
shoulder the badge of the red bull, mark of the
Eceni ancestors, painted in living blood on grey.

When she let go of the face and the eyes of the
enemy lying on the deck-bed, the red bull claimed
all her attention. A pattern wove through other
patterns and rose above them.

I have been Julius Valerius, decurion of the first
troop, First Thracian Cavalry.

Hail is dead. The decurion of the Thracian
cavalry killed him, the one who rides the pied
horse.

I will unleash such vengeance ...

Tightly, Breaca said, 'You killed Hail.'

The vestige of her brother, said, 'Not exactly.
But it is my fault that he died.'

Breaca had brought no sword, but her sling was
knotted at her belt and the handful of stones rolled
in her pouch. The moves to draw one and the
other and join them grew from more than two
years' practice and a summer of certain kills.

'No.'

Luain mac Calma stopped her. The decurion -
the obscene travesty of what Ban had been
- would not have done. He lay still, his eyes
moving from Breaca's to the space a little to her
left. When mac Calma closed his fingers on
Breaca's arm and the sling-stone fell to the deck,
the not-Ban smiled weakly. 'Your Elder has an
unhealthy regard for my welfare. You shouldn't let
him stop you.'

It was the track of his eyes that warned her, and
Airmid, standing too pale and too still, just beside.
Breaca had heard Macha's voice on the night of
the ancestor-dreamer, but she had not seen her
since she left the lands of the living. Turning, she
saw her now, and the others gathered around: the
elder grandmother and, more distantly, her father.
Luain mac Calma stepped carefully past them,
coming to stand between Breaca and the deck-bed.
The ghosts milled around him, as dogs to a hunter.
Macha was foremost.

You're not to be angry. The grandmother said so. Trust me.

Macha had been a grandmother, if only for a
day, but always Ban had been her first love.
How does one display fury to a ghost? As if she
were alive, Breaca said, 'Did you speak to my
daughter? Did you send Graine the dream?'

The ghost nodded, saying nothing. Moving
slowly, she sat on the end of the deck-bed. Ban,
her son, watched her, frozen, as a shrew watches a
hunting snake. If he had loved her in life, he did so
no longer. With visible effort, he drew his eyes
back to the living, to Breaca. 'They want me on
Mona,' he said. 'Neither you nor I can live with
that. You should use your sling.' For the first time,
he spoke in Eceni. His smile was as she remembered.
Her heart was too broken for pity. She
hated him no less.

Her fingers closed on another stone. Luain mac
Calma did not reach for her hand, but said only,
'Breaca, don't. The gods need him alive.'

She shook her head. 'Not on Mona. Not in my
lifetime.'

'But he must not die. You have to believe me in
this. He must live beyond today.'

'Then where? You heard him, he cannot return
to Rome; he has turned his back on the legions.'

'I know. If you will not have him on Mona, you
must say where else.'

Sister and brother reached the answer together,
or the ghosts guided them to it. The sun spread
light on the western deck. Macha stepped into it,
lost in the cold amber. Luain mac Calma joined
her, a tall heron from another land. A day's sail
to the west, the mountains of Hibernia rose to
meet the evening.

Breaca stared at them and, turning, found her
brother had seen the same. His eyes sought
hers, black without end. If they carried a message,
she could not read it. His lips framed the word
before she spoke it so that, in the end, it seemed as
if two voices sounded together.

'Hibernia,' she said. 'Segoventos can take him
to Hibernia. If he is ever to find peace, it will be
there.'



AUTHOR'S NOTE.

For details of this period in the Roman occupation
of Britain, we are indebted almost entirely to
Tacitus. Without his precis of Scapula's disarming
of the eastern tribes and of the events surrounding
the betrayal, capture and pardon of Caradoc/Caratacus, this period of history would be a white
fog, obscured further by random archaeological
finds. Tacitus, of course, was not writing for a
modern audience but for a Rome barely fifty years
beyond the events he was describing. Among his
primary sources was his father-in-law Agricola,
who was not present in Britannia within the
period of Scapula's governorship. Others may
have given personal accounts but it is likely that a
great deal of his information came from military
reports from the field. As recent experience of
empires at war teaches us, battlefield reports are
written with their own heavily accented spin,
designed to display the invader in the best light
possible and the opposition in the worst. When
a general reports that the enemy fought with a
ferocity exceeding everything previously encountered,
even now in the twenty-first century it
would be fair to assume that this is an excuse for
significant losses on the side of the one writing the
report, very possibly compounded by some serious
tactical errors. It seems to me likely that the same
imputations can be read into just such a report
written in the first century for an emperor not
renowned for his magnanimity, where the penalty
for failure was rather more permanent than a
barracking by a hostile press.

Even without the inherent bias of his primary
sources, it would be naive to believe that Tacitus
himself did not add his own spin; regarding the
events on the western frontier, he admits to telescoping
the events of several years into a single brief
narrative to make them more comprehensible and,
in Rome, he grants to Caradoc a monologue of
commendable literacy and brevity, loaded with
implications for an audience not yet born. The
challenge for the modern writer of fiction is to sift
through the ancient fiction for those kernels of
plausible truth and then to find from them the
motivations of all those involved.

In this, other authors are constructive.
Suetonius gives us an insight into the temperaments
of the various Caesars and is certainly our
most authoritative ancient source who may have
had an understanding of Claudius. That emperor
has benefited in recent years from the rather
pleasant whitewash promulgated by Robert
Graves and Derek Jacobi in which Gaius/
Caligula's successor emerges as a well-meaning
idiot surrounded by scheming madmen. Suetonius'
account is less flattering; his Claudius is an
efficient bean-counter with a heavy leaning to
sadism, balanced only by an overwhelming
instinct for self-preservation and a very healthy
(and justified) paranoia. He was not as clearly
unhinged as Caligula but his reign lasted longer
and far more of his subjects, slaves and conquered
enemies died in the palace and in the Circus than
in the reign of any emperor before him. There
seems to be some evidence that Nero, for all his
pretensions, went some way to curb the excesses
of public sadism instigated by his step-uncle.

If we believe Tacitus that Claudius did, in fact,
pardon Caradoc, then the question remains as to
why a man who so clearly enjoyed the slow death
of his enemies might choose to do so. It is possible
that Caradoc simply presented one wholesome
speech and so won the life of himself and his
family but not likely. The answer, I feel, lies in
Claudius' overwhelming need to survive and for
this there must have been some threat, real or
imagined, by which Caradoc bought his life. It
may not be as I have written it but it makes sense
within the context of this fiction.

It should be remembered, above all, that this is
fiction. The skeleton of known fact is very thin
and disjointed and the fantasy woven around it is
designed to fill in those gaps in as compelling
way as possible. Don't take any of it as sworn fact
It won't be.


CHARACTERS AND PRONUNCIATION OF NAMES.

The language of the pre-Roman tribes is lost to us;
we have no means of knowing the exact pronunciations
although linguists make brave
attempts, based on known living and dead
languages, particularly modern and medieval
Breton, Cornish and Welsh. The following are my
best attempts at accuracy. You are free to make
your own. The names of characters based in
history are marked with an asterisk.

Tribal characters.

*Breaca - Bray-ah-ca. Also known as the Boudica,
from the old word 'Boudeg' meaning Bringer of
Victory, thus 'She who Brings Victory'. Breaca is
a derivative of the goddess Briga.

Ban - Breaca's half-brother, son of Macha. The 'a'
is pronounced rather like the 'o' in bonfire.
Without the accent, it means 'white'.

*Caradoc - Kar-a-dok. Lover to Breaca, father to
Cygfa and Cunomar. Co-leader of the western
resistance against Rome.

Cunomar - Koon-oh-mar. Son of Breaca and
Caradoc. His name means 'hound of the sea'.

Cwmfen - Koom-ven. Warrior of the Ordovices.
Lover to Caradoc before Breaca, mother of Cygfa.

Cygfa - Sig-va. Daughter of Caradoc and
Cwmfen, half-sister to Cunomar.

Airmid of Nemain - Air-med. Frog-dreamer,
former lover to Breaca. Airmid is one of the Irish
names of the goddess.

*Amminios - Ah-min-i-oss. Elder brother to
Caradoc, now dead.

Ardacos - Ar-dah-kos. She-bear warrior of the
Caledones. Former lover to Breaca.

*Cunobelin - Koon-oh-bel-in. Father to Caradoc,
now dead. Cun - 'hound', Belin, the sun god.
Hence, Hound of the Sun or Sun Hound.

Dubornos - Doob-ohr-nos. Singer and warrior of
the Eceni, childhood companion to Breaca and Ban.

Eburovic - Eh-boor-oh-vik. Father to Breaca and
Ban, now dead.

Efnis - Eff-neesh. Dreamer of the Eceni.

Gwyddhien - G-with-i-enne. Warrior of the
Silures, lover to Airmid.

Luain mac Calma - Luw-ain mak Kalma. Elder of
Mona and heron-dreamer. A prince of Hibernia.

Macha - Mach-ah. The 'ch' is soft as in Scottish
'loch'. Ban's mother, now dead. Macha is a
derivative of the horse goddess.

Iccius - Ikk-i-ooss. Belgic slave-boy killed in an
accident while enslaved by Amminios. Friend
and soul-mate to Ban.

Roman characters.

Latin is rather closer to our language, although we
would pronounce the letter 'J' as equivalent to the
current 'Y', 'V' would be 'W' and 'C' would be
a hard 'K' in all cases. However, this is so rarely
used that it is simpler to retain standard modern
pronunciation of these letters.

Julius Valerius - officer in the auxiliary cavalry,
originally with the Ala Quinta Gallorum, later
the Ala Prima Thracum.

Quintus Valerius Corvus - prefect of the Ala
Quinta Gallorum.

*Longinus Sdapeze - officer with the Ala Prima
Thracum. 

*Publius Osterius Scapula - second governor of
Britannia, AD 47-51.

*Marcus Ostorius Scapula - his son.

*Aulus Didius Gallus - third governor of
Britannia, AD 52-57.

*Quintus Veranius - fourth governor of Britannia, AD 57-58.

Marullus - centurion with the XXth Legion, later
with the Praetorian Guard in Rome.

Umbricius - actuary with the Ala Quinta
Gallorum.

Sabinius - standard-bearer with the Ala Quinta
Gallorum.

Gaudinius - armourer with the Ala Quinta
Gallorum.

*Emperor Tiberius Claudius Drusus Caesar emperor
of Rome.

*Agrippina the Younger - his niece, also his fourth
wife, mother to Nero.

*Germanicus, a.k.a. Britannicus - son of Claudius
by Messalina, his third wife.

*Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, a.k.a. Nero - son
of Agrippina the Younger and Gnaeus Domitius
Ahenobarbus.


BIBLIOGRAPHY.

In addition to those books mentioned in the first volume, the
following were particularly useful:

Tacitus, The Complete Works (Modern Library College
Editions, Random House, 1942).

Suetonius, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, ed. Tom Griffith
(Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1977).

Claus, M., The Roman Cult of Mithras, trans. Richard Gordon
(Edinburgh University Press, 2000).

Cunliffe, Barry (ed.), Rome (Oxford Archaeological Guides,
Oxford University Press, 1998).

Farvo, D., The Urban Image of Augustan Rome (Cambridge
University Press, 1996).

Holder, P.A., The Roman Army in Britain (B.T. Batsford Ltd,
1982).

Holland, R., Nero, The Man Behind the Myth (Sutton
Publishing, 2000).

Linderman, Frank B., Pretty-Shield, The Story of a Crow
Medicine Woman (University of Nebraska Press, 1932).

Paolis, U.E., Rome, Its People, Life and Customs (Longman
Group, 1958).

White, M.A., SPQR, The History and Social Life of Ancient
Rome (Macmillan, 1965).