Dreaming the Serpent Spear (68 page)

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

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

Huw wet his lips raggedly and blew.

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

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

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

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

“Mount. Everybody mount. Now.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hawk!
”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hawk!”

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

The grey race-filly stood still as stone. Graine slid to the ground and was running even as Cunomar was running. He might have reached the blade before her, but he faltered and
she did not. The thread that drew her to the weapon was the soul-thread that had bound her to the hare, only brighter, because now they were in battle. She lifted it and heard the song at last.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She felt her father close.

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

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

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

“Graine!
No!
”

I trust you to see it does not happen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The world closed into black.

V
ALERIUS RODE IN THE MEMORY OF A DREAM BECOME A
nightmare. He rode a white-splashed black horse at speed from a battlefield, but it was Graine who clung on behind him, not Breaca. His sister was on the race-bred grey filly, held on by a wrap of her own cloak that bound her and kept her from falling.

Her family surrounded her; an honour guard of blood and spirit sworn to shield her with their lives. Cunomar rode on one side with Stone slung across his saddle; in the midst of battle, as they shouted orders for the rear guard, he had stopped to pick up the hound his mother loved. Ulla followed him, with Hawk and Cygfa on the sword side. Airmid, Bellos and Theophilus came bunched together behind.

They galloped fast, but not fast enough to outrun the blood that Breaca was losing, nor, possibly, the half-wing of tiring cavalry who followed, led by Sabinius, who had been standard-bearer even in Valerius’ time and, like Civilis, should have died long since. He drove his men like one possessed, screaming Corvus’ name.