CHAPTER 10

Cygfa, elder daughter of the Boudica, made the three-fold call of the owl at Valerius’ signal. A relay of hidden warriors passed it on down through the mist and the fringes of the forest to the place at the farthest end of their line where her brother, Cunomar, lay on his belly under the winter-flayed roots of a fallen oak.

Cunomar lay on ground that juddered to the stamp of marching feet. The legionaries of the third cohort of the IXth legion who marched a spear’s length from his face continued to sing the fifteenth stanza of the marching song they had begun when the first ranks passed him by. They did not hear the owl, and if they had, they would not have known what it meant. Cunomar heard it and knew exactly what it meant, and did nothing.

No part of him looked human, nor did he feel it. He was naked but for his knife belt and the king-band on his arm which had been his mother’s last gift to him, in the winter before the procurator’s destruction of their steading. Bear’s grease coated him from the soles of his feet to the line of his brow, tinted with woad to render it densely grey. Bands of white lime ringed his eyes and made skull marks on his cheeks. His hair was stiffened with pig’s fat and white lime, making a pale grey scythe that stood up from his scalp.

In the past day, since the burning of the watchtower, he had discarded even the feathers that marked the kills of his past. That act alone severed him from all that had gone before, setting him apart from his peers more than his bloodline or his missing ear could ever have done. Mist-given and woad-held, he was a warrior without any ties to the living, with nothing to fight for but the battle itself, nothing to sway him but the breath of the gods, nothing to care about but the next breath and the next and the next…

The Elders of the Caledonii had taught him the ways of discipline that allowed him to hold his mind still and empty, that he might become a part of the earth. Since dawn, he had held to it, with only the occasional lapse, but the owl’s cry brought with it a memory of the night’s dreaming that would not be shaken off.

Even as he strove for emptiness, Cunomar smelled again the fetid breath of the bear and was back in the nightmare that had woken him the past three nights; this was not a dream of the she-bear, beast of all mystery and glory to whom he had given his soul, but a rank, injured male, which had been hunted into a blind-ended cave and had turned at bay in all its pain and fury, raking out with claws that stretched and stretched and reached past the warrior who came to kill it to the injured child, his sister, who had been sent to the cave for safety and was only now waking and standing, and reaching for her brother, not understanding the danger. In the dream, the bear turned, and rose on its hind legs and smashed a single long-clawed fist down and down and—

Graine! No! Cunomar did not speak the words aloud; his discipline held so much.

Doggedly, he set about controlling his breathing. Sweat rolled greasily from his armpits and buttocks. Presently, he was able to hear again the iron clash of the marching legionaries and the newest stanza of their song.

He worked as he had been taught to clear his mind and would not linger on the memory of Graine’s face as the bear fist smashed down to break her, or on his own failure to save her. It was not the first time the dream had come and he did not believe it would be the last; he knew only that he would give his life to protect his sister, and that no bear, in the dream or out of it, would reach her while he lived.

He could not find the silence again, and stopped trying. Freed, his thoughts fell first on Ardacos, the mentor who had shown him what it was to be a ghost-warrior, giving him a mark to aim for that had seemed beyond all possibility to the child he had been.

Ardacos had long since discarded his own kill-feathers. The small Caledonian warrior marked only those kills where the combat had been single-handed against a worthy opponent; for those he bore a band of red ochre round his upper arm. There were three, and he could name all three warriors and the means of their dying, with each act of their life, as if they were heroes. Not one of them had been Roman, although he had slain as many legionaries as any other living warrior.

Cunomar was not certain whom he considered a worthy opponent now that the world had changed. Through all of his youth, he had dreamed of killing a certain decurion of the Thracian cavalry who rode a pied horse and was known as the scourge of the tribes from east coast to west.

For so many reasons, that man’s death would have been worth an ochre stripe. Then Valerius had ridden his pied horse into the steading and crushed the life from the Roman procurator in an act of blinding savagery that had sealed his return to the Eceni. Only afterwards had he declared himself the Boudica’s brother and by then it was already too late to kill him.

Thus, unwilling, Cunomar had set aside ten years of yearning, or at least, had left it in abeyance. He had not yet said so aloud in the council circle, but it seemed to him obvious that a man who had changed sides twice in his life might easily choose to do so again. For that, if for no other reason, Valerius was not fit to lead the war host if the Boudica should not prove able. Cygfa, clearly, thought otherwise and she was not alone.

Few had spoken of it openly, but it was there to be read in their eyes: the fear that the Boudica had lost the wildfire and must soon be replaced. Many simply refused to believe it could happen, but, like Cygfa, Cunomar had seen his father broken by Rome and knew the signs.

He had no idea how long it would be before the rest came to see as he saw. He only knew that it was not enough to be the Boudica’s only son; he had to prove to himself, to his sister, to those others who might doubt him, above all to the she-bear and the watching gods, that he was the obvious one—the only one—to whom they could turn in adversity. Then, when Valerius stood against him, he could fight, and he could kill, and the world would come to hear what kind of warrior was the Boudica’s son.

It took a deal of self-control not to move at that thought. Cunomar held himself motionless and was rewarded for it. Ahead and a little to his right, in the damp mulch of the forest’s floor where small things crept and a single leaf was large as a roundhouse, a shrew stalked a thready earthworm. Cunomar breathed out a long, controlled exhalation and the shrew did not stop. Since dawn it had skirted him, wary of the stench and the unexpected warmth of his body. Then the worm had surfaced, and was too good to ignore.

The Elders of the Caledonii gave their approval sparingly, but they would have given it now. The ultimate test of their teachings was that the small things—or large—of the forest or heath would come close without fear.

Cunomar breathed more quietly still. His skin itched beneath the layers of grease. A ring of white lime round each eye had dried, pulling the skin into a frown. Small twigs dug into the flesh at his ankles, his hips, his ribs, his chin, all the places where his frame pressed hardest onto the forest floor. Perversely, his throat was dry and craved water at the same time as his bladder began to nag with the need to empty. The flesh of his back ached where the wounds of the flogging had not yet healed. His missing ear burned.

Ahead, the shrew finished its feed. Round-bellied and wet about the muzzle and breast with the life of the worm, it prodded its way under the leaves and curled to sleep. Cunomar catalogued in turn each of the demands of his body and then, setting them aside, gave a good part of his attention to the pattering heartbeat and small, vicious mouth of the shrew and strove to banish all thoughts of Valerius and everything he represented.

A change in the pounding rhythem of the earth drew his gaze back to the ancestors’ trackway. His eyes were level with the highest point of the road, on the apex of the curve that tipped down at either side to marsh and forest. Close enough for Cunomar to smell the sweat, the sandalled, studded feet of the last ranks of the IXth legion stamped by, marching to the beat of a drum too far ahead truly to be heard. The marchers made their own beat. Living flesh impacted resonantly on leather and armour. The lungs of a hundred men drew in the thickening fog and exhaled it, rasping. Ten thousand iron studs hammered the stone track and the sound echoed off the trees onto the marsh and was sucked to silence. Marching men became iron-clad, helmeted ghosts, passing out of the bog mist and back into it, visible only for a spear’s throw either side of where the Boudica’s son, at last, prepared himself to move.

Then they were gone; the last men of the last cohort passed by and the mist closed behind and there were no more. The silence ached more than the noise had done.

A night’s waiting, and half of a morning, bore the fruit they had promised. Cunomar moved his hand a hair’s breadth to the left. Leaves shivered where the shrew slept, and were still. Kneeling in the loam, with the night’s dream banished, with his pulse clear and light in his head, and the breath of the she-bear warming his heart, Cunomar put his two thumbs to his lips and made the sound of a bittern, booming.

Ulla joined him, and Scerros, and his girl-cousin of the northern Eceni whose name Cunomar had never learned. They were barely recognizable, hidden behind the skull patterns of white lime on grey woad. Each smiled, a flash of white teeth that proved them not yet ghosts. Full of the she-bear, fired in breath and heartbeat, filled with the promise of honour and the need for vengeance, they stepped into the fog that shrouded the trackway, and were invisible.

After half a morning of lying still, to move at all was an act of will. To run silently across the last spear’s length of forest, onto the trackway and up behind the last four marching legionaries was worthy of a winter’s tale in its own right.

The stench of bear and pig grease warned the rear guard of the IXth that they were under attack, but not soon enough. Four hands caught four helmeted heads and drew them back; four blades cut through fog and skin and cartilage. Four men screamed pain and warnings and death through severed windpipes that transmitted no sound. Like culled cattle, they bellowed soundlessly, and died as fast. Their eyes rolled up in their heads to show the whites beneath and their limbs fell limp.

Blood flowed in blackening cataracts on the grey, cold pavings of the ancestors’ Stone Way. Four ghosts stepped free and were guided fast away by Airmid and Gunovar and Lanis, who joined together to see that the dead of both sides were not left to wander lost in the cold mist; Valerius had asked for that and no-one had spoken against him.

Other warriors came forward from the trees and helped support the bodies and catch the dead men’s shields and their packs so that nothing might clatter onto the stones and alert the legionaries marching ahead to the slaughter behind. With care, the dead were carried aside and propped by the trees and left to be stripped of their weapons by the children and grandmothers later, when it was safe.

Already the cycle had begun again. Four more ghosted warriors had stepped out from their places in the trees and, as greyly, as silently, caught the helmeted heads of the last four men and cut the breath from their throats before they knew they were dying.

The remaining men of the IXth marched on, caught in their own rhythms of flesh on leather and iron on stone. Far to the front, the horns of the first cohort beckoned, promising with each new refrain tents already pitched and cooking fires lit and wineskins broached; the reward offered to those who marched in the rearguard of any column was to arrive in the evening to a camp already built.

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. 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.”

Dryly, 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. “Let Burannos 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 ahead of 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.

Breaca said, “It needs to be immeasurably better before we can take on a full legion.”

She wiped a slick of sweat from her face. On either side along the trackway, a dozen similarly disorganized skirmishes still raged, as warriors of all ages engaged legionaries in rings or lines. Plumed helmets in black and white reared at intervals above the lines of battle. She saw one in red that reached higher than the others, and watched it fall. Spears arced over and vanished into the mere.

Exhausted, Breaca sat on the turf and thought of Valerius and what he would say at the lack of discipline in the warriors of her war host. She thought of Ardacos, and how the she-bears he had led for ten years in the western war had not needed the discipline of rank and fear, but had followed the fire and heart of the bear with Ardacos as their leader in spirit more than in flesh.

She thought of the warriors of Mona and the years that went into the training of them, so that each took to the field in absolute trust of their own skill and those around them. She looked at the wavering line of untested, untrained warriors and considered what it would take to bring them to that. She felt the weight of her blade in the palm of her hand and the numbness that had been in her since the start of the day’s fighting and she ached almost to weeping for the loss of the sharp, exciting pain that drew her into battle and sang inside of immortality and of stories by the fire.