Dreaming the Serpent Spear (15 page)

Thus enticed, the men of the third cohort marched into a mist that opened three rows in front and closed behind. The forest to their right was as quiet as it had been since they started, and the bog to their left as improbably innocent, and neither was enough to make them break step and look behind.

The third row died, and the fourth. The warriors who had carried away the bodies of the first legionaries sped forward to make kills of their own, running barefooted on the paving slabs, slick with bear grease, protected from the curses of ghosts and the iron cuts of living men by woad and the power of the she-bear.

Twenty marching rows were taken in silence. Eighty men died, and there were still thousands marching. The entirety of the she-bear, all forty-seven warriors, were up and running on the road, pushing their luck with each footfall, taking greater risks with each cut of the knife.

Bloodily wet in his coating of woad grease Cunomar propped a body against a tree and ran forward between two dying men. Ulla was on his left, the girl-cousin on his right. Scerros, a little late lowering his man to the earth, caught up as they reached the next row of marching legionaries.

Breathless, a little flustered, not quite riding the power of the bear, Scerros fumbled his hold. His knife scored flesh and the edge of one pumping vessel, but not the ridged pipe of the trachea. The legionary screeched like a throttled hen and his death was neither neat nor fast.

The three men of his row were too late to profit from the warning, but the ones in front had time to call out an alarm and draw their short stabbing swords and shoulder their shields and turn at least halfway to face the mob of grey-slaked phantoms who came howling at them from the mist, all pretence at secrecy abandoned.

The rearmost four men died messily, inflicting wounds before they did so. The next four achieved a kill, cutting the number of the she-bear to forty-six. In the time between, Cunomar put his bloodied fingers to his lips, filled his lungs with bog air and let out a single, mind-numbing whistle that reached at least to the head of the cohort. Lest it be misconstrued, or unheard, he took from his belt a cow’s horn lipped in copper, and brayed a note, harsh as a legionary mule, that rocked the mere and silenced the crows gathering on the margins of the forest. That done, he paused to wipe his knife blade free of the gobbets of flesh that had clung to it, and, howling the name of the newly dead she-bear as a fresh battle cry, hurled himself joyfully into battle.

The Boudica, and those waiting for her, heard a whistle and then an ox-horn pierce the fog. At that signal, four axes finished what they had begun before the legion’s march. The oak that fell across the trackway as the last note sounded was broad as a man is long and thickly branched. It killed three
of the four men passing under it and crushed the legs of the fourth, so that he was an easy target for a slingstone.

Breaca sent the stone, aiming for the soft part of his skull where the bones met above the ear. There had been a time when she could split a held hair at fifty paces. That time was not now, but half a morning’s practice had restored enough of the old skill to hit a trapped man less than a spear’s length away. Among a clatter of thrown spears and slung stones, hers hit close enough to where it was sent and she made her second kill in two days and heard it cheered by the youths around her as if it were a victory in itself.

Dubornos was at her side. He, too, had once been whole, until the ravages of Rome had reduced him to the sling and the knife.

She felt his hand on her shoulder. “It’ll come with time,” he said, quietly. “For now, what we do doesn’t have to be glorious or honourable, only enough to teach warriors who have held their first blade for less than a month how to fight.”

Valerius had said exactly that in the council meetings of the night and Breaca had repeated it to the war host: this battle is a training ground; don’t expect heroism, only do your best to survive.

It was Longinus who had said: “Even if you cut off the rear part of the legion, it won’t be easy. The centurions of the Ninth have all seen action in the Germanies; they know how to fight. As soon as they realize they’re on their own, they’ll take command and try to hold order until help arrives. Don’t expect them to give their lives away.”

Longinus had impressed Breaca more each time she met him. Her brother’s soul-friend was quiet and thoughtful and when he spoke, which was rarely, it was to good effect.

With his warning in her ears, she had watched the glitter of mounted officers riding at the head of the column, and marked the harder, more knowing faces of the centurions as they passed. These were the men who had recognized the possibility of ambush long before it came, and might have seen the part-cut trees swaying at intervals along the margins of the trackway ready to fall with two more blows of the axe.

It was for these men that she had insisted the chippings be cleared as the axes created them and the ruined trunks wrapped about in moss and lichens. For these, too, the best slingers had been stationed, watching for the marks of rank and authority, with orders to target them soon and early.

They were not soon enough and Longinus was proved entirely right. Deprived of all contact with senior officers, the twelve centurions trapped on the wrong side of the fallen oak took rapid command of their men. Startlingly fast, they drew order out of chaos. A dozen of the legionaries nearest Breaca turned, raising their shields to form a roof against falling spears. It was an obvious move for men who had not served in the west and did not know that slingstones were aimed for the unshielded knees of those who lifted their shields to protect their faces and heads, crippling them as effectively as if they had been hamstrung.

Somebody knew it, further up the line. Breaca heard frantic orders bellowed down the ragged column. The exposed men were already falling, but one group, higher up, were making better use of their shields.

Leaving the new formation to Ardacos and those who fought with him, she ran between the trees towards the source of the shouting. Oak branches stabbed at her. Leafing
hazel slapped her face. She came level with a group of eight men who had formed a ring, kneeling, with six shields held outwards and two above. She could see no place where a pebble could pass through between the shields, still less a spear. From the centre came the bull’s bellow of a centurion, passing orders down the line. Already other eights were forming; spent spears glanced off the raised shields and skittered uselessly into the mere.

Dubornos was close to Breaca’s right shoulder. He had not been flogged as she had, but Rome’s inquisitors had ruined him long before that. For the past eight years, the only weapon he could bear with his right hand had been a sling. He had practised harder and for longer than anyone she knew, and was breathtakingly good.

Without turning, she said, “If I part the shields, can you at least wound the centurion in the centre?”

“If I can see him, I can kill him.”

Anyone else would have grinned, saying that. Dubornos had never been light-hearted; he carried too much guilt and grief for that. He slid a stone into his sling, and circled his wrist fluidly. “If you can do something to lower the shield with the black swans on it, it would give me the easiest target.”

The black swans faced each other on either side of crossed thunderbolts painted scarlet on black with the centurion’s left-pointing chevron below. Breaca could see the wind-burned skin of the man whose mark they were. His eyes looked momentarily over the rim of his shield and were hidden again. She said, “We should be mounted for this,” and ran out, holding her spear before her as if she were hunting boar.

The tip caught the left hand of the two swans, which was inmost on the shield, and drove through the bull’s hide to lodge in the laminated wood behind. Breaca thrust her whole weight in and then wrenched it back, snagging the shield in its wake.

The spear twisted in her hands and cracked and broke. A slingstone blurred at the edge of her vision. The wall of scarlet thunderbolts swayed and parted. Then her own private thunderbolt punched her in the back, between the shoulder blades where the flesh was most damaged. A scream split the air and she knew it as hers in the infinite moment before she fell. Sometime before she hit the paved rock of the trackway, hands caught her and held her and carried her. Some of them remembered not to touch her back.

The pain in her shoulder was astonishing, like a new wound breaking open. Someone whimpered, childlike. It seemed not to be her. When she was sure of that, Breaca opened her eyes. Dubornos’ face loomed above hers. He was not whimpering, but swearing and weeping together. Tears made shining tracks on his cheeks. He looked ten years older than he had done when she ran past him to break the shield ring.

“Never,” he said, “never, never, never did I think you would do that. Why couldn’t you throw your god-cursed spear like anyone else who values life above stupid, stupid displays of heroics? We have to
survive
, that’s all. You of all people have nothing to prove here.”

There were too many people too close to answer that, and a place on her shoulder that burned as if she had taken a sword thrust, which seemed unlikely. The whimpering continued and still she could not place the source.

She sat up and looked around. A young copper-haired youth knelt nearby with a bruise flaring crimson across his mouth and wild, white-rimmed eyes. The hair hung in furls by his left ear, as if the war-braids had been forcibly ripped out, and a livid welt at his right wrist showed where a sling had recently been stripped from him. He stared at Dubornos as if the singer were more dangerous than all the avenging armies of Rome. The whimpering was his.

To him, Breaca said, “Was it your slingstone that hit me?”

His face was answer enough. He was too terrified to speak. She said, “What’s your name?”

Dubornos answered for him. “Burannos. He was one of those who failed Cunomar’s spear trials. He trained instead as a slinger. Not well enough.”

Breaca said, “We could list for him the failures of our youth but it would take longer than we have.”

She tried to stand, and succeeded on the second attempt. She was deeper in the forest than she had been, shielded by trees from the track. Sounds of battle came clearly enough, but not the detail. She asked, “Did we break the eight-ring?”

Dubornos looked down at his hands. His sling still hung from his wrist, cradling a pebble as if it were the easiest thing in the world to walk with the pebble held, not something youths practised for months without success.

“No. The centurion is dead and one other, but when you fell we brought you clear and the ring re-formed. I set a dozen slingers to keep them occupied. If we leave it too long, they’ll remember that attack is better than defence and charge us instead.”

“Then we have to break them open again before they begin to think.” Someone offered Breaca a sling and she took
it. “Burannos can stand between us. Set anyone with a spear who knows how to throw it to aim at one of the shields. We can direct the stones through to the centre if they can make a big enough gap.”

Back on the track, with fighting on either side, the black-swan shield was central now in a ring of five, with one held as roof-shield above. Young warriors hidden in the tree line with slings took time for target practice. Pebbles rang on bull’s hide and iron. The sound was lost in the other noises of battle.

A dozen youths with spears stepped past the shelter of the trees to take foot on the margins of the track. The legionaries trapped within the ring saw the danger. Momentarily, they pulled their shields tighter until the edges overlapped and there were no gaps at all, like a woodlouse, curling. Then one in the centre, seeing what might come, gave three words as an order and smoothly, beautifully, as if by an act of the gods, the entire ring unfolded and became a line.

For a heartbeat, perhaps two, the legionaries were not moving, each man looking sideways to see if he remained in line with his neighbours. The junior officer was in the centre, and had taken his centurion’s helmet. The horsehair crest waved black in the wind. He looked along the line and drew breath to shout a fresh order.

Breaca was before him. “Now!”

Dubornos’ pebble was too small to see, only a whisper of marsh mist as it passed her. A legionary whose elbow had been carelessly shown screamed and pitched forward, the bones of his forearm shattered.

The men who flanked him were already running. They jumped their comrade’s fallen body and when they landed they moved together, filling the gap where he had been. A spear angled low beneath the shield of one and he had to jump to avoid it. The second time, Breaca was waiting for the flash of flesh at his throat.

Burannos was ahead of her. She felt the swing of his throw and saw the legionary stagger. Her own stone was aimed lower and broke the man’s kneecap. A spear jammed into the shield of his running-mate, thrust by a rust-haired girl who, if she was not Burannos’ twin, was his close kin. A sword peeled skin off her forearm as she jumped back. Another warrior, careless of death, stepped in to jab a spear into the face of a legionary who died in the moment when he realized he faced a dozen warriors alone.

Breaca reached for her sword and swore violently as the first two strokes with it pulled at muscles that were still stiffened from her night’s combat against Valerius. Then she warmed into the movement and, for a time, there was no room for doubt or the sluggishness of pain, only action and the need to survive, and with luck, to show an example that was not all bad.

In a lifetime of untidy skirmishes, it was the messiest. At the end, Breaca lowered her blade. There was blood on it, but only from cutting the throat of a man already down. She leaned back on a tree and the press of it down the length of her spine was almost welcome.

“Not glorious, but we lost no-one. It could have been worse.”

Dubornos spoke from his place at her shoulder. Together, he and Breaca watched the youth, Burannos, run
forward to the rust-haired girl and embrace her in the middle of the trackway, as if they had fought a final battle, not a minor skirmish that cut the tail-tip of a serpent whose head still waited unawares and could smash them without thought.