Dreaming the Eagle (43 page)

Ban’s bowels cramped in terror. In the first months of his slavery he had been forced to watch a crucifixion and the memory of it had woken him for nights afterwards, dry-mouthed and retching. With the passing months, his mind had healed over the horror, in the way the body scabs over a wound, giving him false courage. Now, the absolute reality swamped his mind and paralysed his limbs. With no effort at all, he could feel the nails scrape between the bones of his arms and the days and nights of screaming agony that followed as his body succumbed to the drag of its own weight. Pressing his brow against the boards in front of him, he breathed, whistling, through a windpipe tight as a straw. The world flashed scarlet and black behind the seal of his eyes.

The four-year-olds were leaving the arena by the time he could breathe freely again. The drum roll sounded for the threeyear-olds. In another time and a different world, he would have been riding the good solid bay with four white socks that was the best horse from his own group. He made himself peer again through the crack; it was better to make the world normal, to think about the mounts and how they were turned out, than to let his mind run free.

He heard the horses before he saw them and knew from the jagged rhythm that something was wrong. The first rank was perfect: four greys turned out in black leather harness with riders in black and polished bronze. The crowd gasped its appreciation. The second rank were chestnut and the third bay, and every one of them was perfect. The problem lay in the fourth rank, the second from last. The colours were mixed - a patchwork of piebalds and skewbalds, none of them from his farm. The black and white horse at the far end of the line was fighting its rider, had been doing so since before they ever entered the arena and continued as the squadron wheeled to the right, to face Ban and the magistrate, and halted. The rider of the pied horse was not one that Ban knew. From a distance, he looked Batavian, one of the hired mercenaries from the tribes on the western, imperial side of the Rhine. He should have been a good horseman - Batavians were amongst the best - but this mount had the better of him and anyone watching could see it.

Ban knew the opening drill well enough that he could do it - had once done it - blindfold. In theory, the riders saluted and moved immediately into a canter, riding straight for the wall beneath the magistrate’s box. Less than a horse’s length from the boards, they split down the centre and wheeled hard, half left and half right, making two long columns that raced the length of the arena parallel to the stands. Four phalanxes of four-year-olds - eighty horses in all - had done it perfectly. The lead group of threeyearolds managed for four strides before the fractious piebald colt exploded beyond all control.

The result was chaos. Horses from the front two ranks crashed into the boarding that protected the side of the arena. Others shied, bucked or wheeled to be clear of the danger. Bigger horses barged into smaller ones and knocked them from their feet. A young chestnut filly with thin legs fell to the ground, screaming. Ban saw her rider struggle to throw himself clear of the saddle horns before his leg was crushed beneath her. A short while later they both rose, unharmed, but no-one was watching them by then. The crowd’s attention - and Ban’s - was focused on the centre of the arena where a pied colt with a hide like milk-streaked jet fought a blond giant with hard hands, a harder bit and a cutting whip, and it was clear to anyone who knew anything that the horse would die fighting before it gave in.

The crowd loved the scent of blood. The magistrate, who had been to Rome and seen the games, felt the mood change and sent swift orders. Slaves and freedmen ran from the box and messages were shouted ahead to the other riders. Some of them, those who had fought in battle and could think, had already ridden close with ropes to restrain the colt and were waved back. The remaining threeyear-olds were cleared from the arena, leaving the colt and the man alone on the sands. Above him in the tiers of seating, Ban heard men and women begin to wager on the winner and how long it would take and whether it would be allowed to go all the way until the horse killed the man or if the magistrate would stop them first and have the beast slaughtered.

Ban heard only snatches of the betting. He squirmed his way back under the tiers of seats and out through the grain store far more fluidly than he had entered. The fear of earlier vanished like dew under a hot sun. He knew how Iccius had felt each time he walked back into the dormitory after a night with Braxus; the worst had happened and nothing else could touch him. Better than that, he was free to die, if it could be done with honour, and he thought now that it could. He crawled out into daylight, crouched for a moment to let his eyes adjust to the flood of light and colour and ran for the arena.

Nobody stopped him. The noise of the stands receded, as if his ears had been plugged with loose wool. The world stood on the other side of a gauze curtain through which air and light filtered slowly, deadening sight and sound, except in that one place, in the centre of the sands, where a colt he had known was fighting to the death, and would take him with it. A dun filly cantered on the edge of his vision, dead a long time since and newly present amongst the ghosts as a promise of what was to come.

He reached the front of the stands. Still nobody saw him or tried to hold him back. He was invisible, wrapped in the care of the gods. He remembered a conversation on a hillside in another life. Is this how it feels before battle? Yes, but in battle one has choice. He had not known, then, what it was to choose death over life, or how it freed one from care. He vaulted over the oak palisade and landed lightly on the sand.

He was three strides out into the arena when the first of the magistrate’s servants saw him. The man carried a horn-handled knife at his belt - and then didn’t. Ban crouched, carving the air in front of him, as he had done in the bath house. The blade was sharp on both edges and honed to a fine point.

‘You can die if you want. It makes no difference to me.’

It was the truth, spoken without bravado and recognizable as such. The man weighed the cost of a possible flogging against the certainty of a knife in his chest and made the wise choice. Ban grinned at him. ‘In war you can choose.’ He said it aloud in Eceni, because that, too, was possible now. The man backed away, holding his hands before him, his eyes showing white at the rims. No-one else took his place.

In the centre of the arena, the Batavian was in trouble. He was trapped in a saddle designed for cavalry riders in war. Every part of it had been adapted over the years to hold a rider in place without need for hands in the face of an enemy whose main task was to unseat his opponent. Padded horns at front and back bent inwards and pressed down on his thighs, holding him in place as the colt threw itself into a series of spine-jarring bucks. To dismount with any grace at all, he would need the beast to stop and it was not going to stop.

Faced with death or dishonour, the man chose to fight and, because he had no other weapons, he was using the bit and the whip without recourse to reason. The bit must have been Milo’s doing. It was a harder one than Fox would ever have countenanced, with a high port that could pierce the hard palate and sharp edges that had already lacerated gums and lips so that red foam splattered back over the shining white-on-black hide. The whip was thin and left long, lacerated cuts and the horse took as much notice of them as he would of a mosquito. There is a staging post in rage which no amount of pain will extinguish. Ban had experienced it once, flogged by Braxus, and had never forgotten. The colt had been angry before it entered the arena; with calm handling it might have been settled but the Batavian had thrown calm handling to the gods; he was as angry as the colt and every cut and jab and back-breaking buck spun them both deeper into a mindless, lethal frenzy.

Blood spattered freely on the sand. The smell of it, briefly, was the smell of the hypocaust, until a wall of horse-and man-sweat flooded everything else. Ban stood very still. His heart swelled. The overwhelming power of the colt filled him with pride and awe. He remembered an old tale of the ancestors who had sacrificed horses to the gods before they had come to know that horses were the gods walking on earth and that to kill them was sacrilege. He could believe of this horse that it was a god, or a gift of the gods. The Batavian on top was a mortal man who could see his own death approaching.

Ban raised his arm. In the neutral Gaulish of the region he called out, ‘Do you know the cavalry dismount?’

The colt reared from the sound of the new voice. The man threw himself forward, hugging the neck. Every rider’s fear is the horse that throws itself backwards. Without a chance to dismount, the rider dies, crushed beneath a writhing mass of horseflesh. For a heartbeat, the pair hung high in the air, the horse and his clinging parasite, and death hung with them.

The crowd cheered, distantly. The spectacle was perfect. The man had been picked for his colouring as much as his skill as a rider; his hair was white blond, paler even than Iccius’, and it flowed like a flag over his black leather corselet. The horse was bridled in black with a halter beneath of bleached white rope. Its hide was night black with streaks of poured milk. From a distance, the sweat gave a polished shine to them both and the freckles of blood were not visible.

The colt teetered on the brink and came down again, forefeet smashing the sand into dust. Ban skidded sideways to avoid a striking hoof. Over the bruising hammer of a standing buck, he shouted, ‘They will not stop this. The magistrate himself has bet two thousand denarii on your death. Can you do the dismount?’

‘Yes.’ The word was thrown over his shoulder, lost in the churning spray of a turn.

‘Good. I will throw sand in his face. He will stop when it hits him, then flinch, as if from the wind. Do it then.’

It was a trick Fox had taught him to get the better of the big chestnut stud horse with the foul temper. Then, Ban had not had to mount after, only catch a halter rope. He prayed and felt the gods at his side and knew that he could not fail. At worst, the colt would kill him; at best, he would kill himself. He had yet to decide whether to kill the colt. It, too, deserved release from slavery.

He stooped and caught a fistful of sand. The colt reared again, screaming. Heartbeats passed with it high in the air. As it came down, Ban moved round to one shoulder and, as the forefeet hammered into sand, he threw.

All things happened at once. The crowd rose to its feet, sensing a climax. The colt, following the instinct of a thousand generations, propped and spun away from a desert wind that did not exist. The Batavian, to his credit, executed a perfect cavalry dismount. All he needed was a horse that stayed level for more than one stride and he was up and off, tucking his shoulder in and rolling on the sand to come up on his feet. That half of the crowd that had bet on his survival cheered. The rest booed. The magistrate signalled his servants, who began to run onto the sand. The colt, freed of its burden, looked around for an exit and saw it, an open gap in the distance with none but a skinny boy in the space between. Scenting freedom, it sprang from a standing start to a full gallop. At the second stride, its shoulder brushed the boy. Ban gripped his stolen knife in his teeth, reached up with both hands for the curved horns of the saddle, kicked up, once, twice, and was on.

The mount at full gallop is the most difficult manoeuvre a cavalryman can be asked to make. To be successful, he must land in the saddle exactly between the horns and slip his legs into place beneath them. In full armour, it is almost impossible. For a lean, lithe boy who had practised half his childhood, albeit with a less difficult saddle, it was an act aided by the gods. Even with a shield, he could have done it.

The colt did not stop. The boy was lighter than the man had been and he did not grab at the reins or attempt to stop the onward rush to freedom. On the contrary, Ban leaned forward with the knife in his hand and cut the bridle at the poll, sweeping the ear loops free. The horse spat the bit to the arena floor. The halter had a single rope, coiled up and knotted under the chin. It gave a handhold, nothing more. Ban left it in place and held onto the mane, leaning forward and shouting encouragement. They reached the gates and they were flying.

Men of the three-and four-year-old phalanxes were waiting for them. Milo, of all men, had known both colt and boy and had seen what might happen. Eighty mounted men stood strung out in an arc on the rain-damp turf of the collecting area. The horse saw only gaps between others of its kind. Ban saw the trap - a rope held taut at neck height, too high to jump and too low to duck under. He had no reins and no way to pull the horse round. With perfect prescience, he saw the colt’s death of a broken neck and his own, infinitely slower, nailed to wood. He looked to both sides. There was a gap of sorts on the right between the endmost rider and the arena wall. He reached forward along the colt’s neck.

‘Hai!’

He slapped a cupped palm on the colt’s left eye. The horse jerked violently to the right, saw the gap and forced it open. They broke free. Open grassland stretched out before them. The legionary camp lay ahead and to the right. A fringe of oak darkened the northern half of the horizon. Beyond that, there was nothing but space. The colt lengthened his stride.

‘Stop them!’ Milo whipped his own horse into a gallop. It was slow and kind and stood no chance. He wheeled round and raised his whip hand, pointing. ‘Freedom or his worth in gold to the man who takes them alive!’

He could have made no better offer. One hundred and nineteen mounted men, over half of them already free, kicked their horses forward. One hundred and nineteen war-trained horses threw their hearts into running. The spectators fighting to reach the gates of the arena felt the reverberating thunder as the race began. The betting began afresh, on the pied colt or the hunters.

Ban knew himself blessed. He hung in that gap between life and death, awaiting the call to cross the river. He regretted his failure to kill Amminios, or even Milo, but nothing else. In his fist, he gripped the stolen blade, the point turned into his heart, and he knew without question that he could use it when the time came. Given time, if the gods so willed, he would kill the god-horse first, slicing open the great veins in the neck as the ancestors had done in their sacrifice, and they would ride together across the river to the world of the dead. He did not feel it to be sacrilege.