Dreaming the Serpent Spear (35 page)

The temple dominated everything. There was no elegance to it, only an overwhelming size and a quantity of gold on the roof that had not yet melted because the fire could not broach the great gap of paved courtyard around.

If an emperor-made-god gauged the love of his former subjects by the size of the building they erected in his honour,
Claudius would have been well pleased with the scale of the temple that had been built on the site of his only victory. Ten tall warriors could have stood one on the shoulders of the other, and the head of the highest would not have topped the roof. Fifteen as tall could have lain on the ground, heels to crown, and they would barely have stretched its length.

The flinted walls drank in the lights of many fires and juggled them, mixing in shadow, so that they seemed awash with battle-blood and gore, a shrine to the glory of dying. Across the front, a row of white fluted columns, thick as aged oaks, supported the roof. Behind them, great bronze doors, each as wide as a horse is long, stood shut against the warriors and the coming night. Above, the roof tiles were either gilded lead or, more likely, solid gold. They cast soft, buttery light onto the grey courtyard.

It was still breathtaking in its grandeur, however ugly. Standing in the glow of it, with Stone at her side, Breaca asked, “Is it like this in Rome?”

Theophilus stood beside her. She had found him in the cellar of his hospital, safe when the rest of the city blazed around him. He was burned about the face and feet and down the length of one arm, but no worse than anyone else.

He said, “A little. When all the roofs are made of gold, one notices them less and the minds behind them more. Your warriors wish you to share in their celebrations.”

Breaca wanted to talk to him about the well, or the burns on the feet of the war host, or anything else that was not war, but he was looking pointedly over her shoulder and so she turned, and tried not to look tired.

Cygfa was there, just out of spear’s throw of the bronze doors, with Braint and a handful of others Breaca recognized
from Mona together with several dozen she did not. They hailed her and she would have joined them and their enthusiasm but she saw Valerius on the fringes, sitting astride a low wall, leaning back to back with Longinus and talking animatedly to a lean youth with a burn scar angled across one cheek. He had tried to wash since she had last seen him, so that the old ash and dried blood had gone from his face and there was only a powdering of new ash, from the flakes that fell steadily from the sky.

He saw Breaca and his face became still, as it always did these days, studying her. He seemed content with what he saw and was about to speak, then he glanced past her and his eyes flew wide and she read astonishment and relief and an unfeigned joy and what was most surprising about all of those was that he made no attempt to hide them. Sometime in the last two days he had shed a skin and was emerging new and fresh in ways she had not yet fully grasped. He clapped the youth on the shoulder and said something to Longinus to bring him along and vaulted a second small wall to join them.

“Theophilus!” He embraced the old man gently, avoiding the more obvious hurts, and then held him away, the better to study him. “Where did she find you? I thought nothing could live through that fire.”

“Like a mole, he took refuge in the well,” said Breaca acidly. “And emerged alive to prove to us that Alexandrian engineering is the best in the world. What happened to your arm?”

Her brother had a cut to his forearm that needed attention. In the past, he would have hidden it; now it was open, oozing old blood at the edges.

“A man I thought already dead proved not to be.” Valerius had knelt to greet Stone. “And another is standing in front of me. It has been a day for the dead being alive, only this time I am happy with it.” He was laughing and a little reckless with the relief of a battle over. To Theophilus, he said, “Are you here to witness the fall of Claudius’ temple? You’ve come too soon. Even without water, they’ll hold out for a night and a day.”

“They have water,” said Theophilus. They’ve been storing barrels of it in the back of the
cella
since before you came to see me. And corn.”

“Have they, just? Someone was thinking clearly. So then Cygfa was right: we will have to break in through the roof.” Valerius caught the eye of the youth with the scarred face. “Huw, they have water and food enough for a half-month. Will you find Madb and tell her? I’ll find Ardacos, and bring him here to talk on it. Longinus, if you can call Cygfa we can meet at the base of Claudius’ altar. Breaca, have you thought what can be done with—”

Theophilus put out a hand and caught him. “Is it so urgent?” he asked. “Or could you give me your sister for part of the night before you begin to plan your assault?”

It was the tone of his voice more than the words that caught them. Longinus had almost left them. He turned back and looked at the old physician with the quiet surmise he gave to most things that were serious.

Valerius caught Breaca’s eye and asked a question, silently. When she answered the same way, he said, “The warriors need rest and food. We won’t begin again before dawn and there is not so much to plan that we can’t do it without Breaca, although it would be good if she were back by dawn. What do you want of her?”

“I want her to come with me and see a place that will soon be gone.”

Breaca asked, “Will it change what we do?”

“I don’t know enough about siege warfare to be able to tell you that,” said Theophilus cautiously. “But I believe it may change who you are.”

He led her through the eastern gates of the dying city and out across paddocks and open grassland. The ground was greenly undulant, untouched by the day’s violence; a steady easterly breeze sent the ash and sound and smells of war the other way.

They walked slowly, because their feet were burned and because Stone was stiff from the fighting. Theophilus’ ruined robes brushed the turf in time with his stride. The sound became the whisper of wind in the trees and joined with the freshening smell of the dusk to wash away the soil of war.

Away from the braziers and torches, the evening landscape settled into muted, overlapping greys. Breaca traced the lines of the distant slopes in her mind, and then again, and then, “Are we going somewhere I should recognize?” she asked.

“I think you might.” Theophilus paused at the top of a small rise. “You were here, I believe, when Cunobelin, the Sun Hound, was sent on his way to meet his gods?”

“That man had no gods,” Breaca said dryly, “or only found them at the end of his life. But yes, I was here. Could we stop for a minute? He’s not someone I would want to meet again unprepared, even if there’s nothing of him left but a memory.”

She felt the touch of Theophilus’ smile as he turned back to join her. “Your brother was generous with his time,” he said. “We have until dawn if you need it.”

They stood and then sat together on the peak of the hillock, a man, a woman and a crippled war hound, looking down towards the south and east to where a smaller, steeper-edged hillock lay nested in the landscape.

By feel, Breaca teased out the knots in Stone’s pelt. Reflectively, she said, “Cunobelin was the greatest diplomat of his day. Caradoc once said of his father that he could outmatch any man in the game of Warrior’s Dance and that he never stopped playing. His manipulations hurt his family, but they kept his land safe. For five decades, he balanced the wishes of Rome against the needs of his people and kept the legions from our shores.”

“You didn’t like him?” Theophilus read the tone rather than the words.

“He was father to Caradoc, whom I loved, and Caradoc is father in turn to all three of my children. No, I didn’t like him. I learned to respect him and all that he tried to do, nothing more.”

“Then perhaps we should not go down to his grave mound,” Theophilus said. He balanced his chin on one fist, brooding. “After you left, I had time to think before your war host descended on the city. It seemed to me then that there was something … different about the mound, that it could act for you as the temple of Aesclepius does for the Greeks.”

“You think I could dream my healing there?”

“At least the beginnings of it. Possibly. I make no guarantees.”

“No healer ever makes guarantees. No-one would believe them if they did.” Breaca rubbed a last clot of blood from Stone’s mane and stood up. “We should go on.”

Walking to the rhythm of Theophilus’ robes, it was hard not to remember the clash and colour of the Sun Hound’s funeral and all that had led from it. For all the brazen sun, the seeds of destruction had first sprouted there.

Breaca said, “If it were not for this man’s sons, I would have no children, but we would also not have war with Rome. It was Amminios, his second son, who first petitioned the emperor Gaius for help to regain lands he thought rightfully his, and so invited the legions to Britannia.”

“Which would you rather have, life as it is now, or no children and no invasion?”

“I don’t know. I can’t imagine life without either. Is this the mound? I had remembered something bigger.”

Theophilus said, “We’re coming at it from the back. The entrance faces east and it seems taller there. Once, there was a timber door, turfed over, but veterans took it away and chopped it for firewood. The children play games in it now.”

Memory and passing years had swelled the mound to the size of a roundhouse, bathed in dawn sunlight, made more brilliant by the layerings of gold. In the dusk of a battle-torn evening, it shrank again to a squat, low hillock, like a sleeping bear shouldered against the dark.

Set alongside the height and grandeur of Claudius’ temple, it was nothing, a wrinkle in the flat paddocks only just high enough for a warrior to step into and perhaps twenty to stand inside, if they did not mind being packed close. It was oval, with the long sides facing east and west to the rising and setting sun. Breaca walked round the northern curve of it, and saw the gaping wound of the door and the stale darkness inside.

She was not given to open prayer, but she spoke aloud an oath to Nemain as the dark reached out for her. Children may have played in the mound in daylight, but it was hard to imagine anyone, child or adult, choosing to come to it as she did, in poor light at the end of day with broken wood and hide swaying in the breeze and the utter blackness of the tomb rustling with small beasts of the night.

Theophilus joined her, standing a little away. “The place was untouched through all the time when the Twentieth maintained the garrison here. The order to break it open came from procurator Catus.”

Breaca turned and spat into the wind. “I trust the Sun Hound has met him in the lands beyond life, and exacted payment for the desecration of his resting place.”

“Was it you who killed him?”

She had forgotten he would not know. “No. I was barely alive, certainly not fit to raise a blade. Valerius did it, with his Crow-horse. The two are one when they’re in battle. No man could survive them both.”

“I had hoped it might have been him.”

Theophilus came closer and ducked beneath the low lintel to stand just inside the grave. His robes became dimmer with the dark. From there, his voice echoed. “This place is not a temple, but it has a feel to it that I have known only rarely and in the most sacred of places. I can stay with you if you’d like, or leave you alone with whatever may be here?”

It was night, then, no longer dusk. Stars grew sharp above, but did not give enough light to see by. Stone stood pressed against Breaca’s leg and would not go forward. The grave’s mouth yawned blackly open with fragments of broken
wood at the margins. The air around it smelled dryly of old bones and leather.

She said, “Could you wait on the other side? So that I can be alone, and yet not be left?”

“Of course.” Bony fingers gripped her shoulder, giving strength. “Call if you need me.”

The soft slur of his robes whispered to the far side of the mound and fell silent.

The Greeks sleep in the temple of the dreamer-god, and dream of their healing.

So Maroc, the old Elder, had said in the halycon days on Mona when all that mattered was who might next become Warrior after the horn passed from Venutios.

The grave mound built for Cunobelin, Hound of the Sun, was not a temple to any god, nor, evidently, was it possible to sleep there.

At first, it was enough simply to step forward into the dark as Theophilus had done. The greying ends of the day were swallowed and made nothing. Breaca put a hand down and felt the hairs grow stiff on Stone’s neck as he hung close to her heel. Goose-flight brushed her own spine.

“I was never an enemy,” she said aloud.

The dark waited, wanting more. For a while, she had no more to give; then, searching old, dry memories, she said, “The Sun Hound gave me his ring and his oath. I am his daughter in spirit, promised his aid to the ends of the earth and the four winds.”

It was an old oath even when Cunobelin had made it, and had sounded archaic on the tongue of a man so evidently wedded to commerce and the mores of Rome. At the time,
Breaca had thought the man glib and his oath prideful and had soon forgotten it.

It felt less so here, in the place of his resting. She waited in the grave’s mouth. Her words were swallowed and did not come back, but the sense of enmity grew less, and she was able to step forwards, a pace at a time, and feel her way into the cavity.

Once, the mound’s interior had been lined with new wood, ripe with resin and the scents of new-cooked food, placed there to send the dead soul to its rest in fine fettle. Only dry earth was left, which crumbled to dust under her fingertips, and spattered in her eyes.

She made herself feel round the whole perimeter before she lay down. The procurator’s men had emptied it entirely. Nothing was left of the golden shield or the shining blades, nothing of the gilded chariot that Cartimandua had given, always too ostentatious, or the jars of wine and of olives, the platters and beakers of bread and meat and ale laid for three days and then broken, that they might pass to the lands beyond life and not feed the living. Nothing was left, either, of the bier on which the Sun Hound’s body had lain, or the urn of ashes that was left after they burned him.