CHAPTER 17

The military hospital that served the citizens of Camulodunum was as quiet as it had ever been.

Three beds were occupied: two by women suffering milk-fever after childbirth, in both cases exacerbated by fear and five days of siege-hunger; the third by Peltrasius Maximus, a garrulous, opinionated veteran of the XXth legion who was suffering from gravel of the bladder.

Peltrasius had been ordered to drink a flagon of well water at each watch—water being the only thing in plentiful supply—and this had naturally increased both the frequency and the volume of his urination. His howls of pain as each corn-sized piece of grit passed down the length of his urethra could be heard as far abroad as the theatre and the forum.

In happier times, men would have made jokes of Peltrasius’ pain, and built a mummery around it, so that the theatre would profit from the man’s misfortune. Now, with the smoke of a thousand fires obscuring the horizon and the numbers of the Eceni war host rumoured to be in the tens of thousands, the more gullible among the population, veterans as well as natives, claimed to have heard the ghost of Cunobelin arise from his grave mound and seen it stalk the emptying streets of the city. They would not have it that mortal pain could sound like the vengeful souls of the dead.

Peltrasius was not close to dying, only wished that he were. Theophilus of Athens and Cos, once physician to emperors and reduced now to tending retired soldiers who suffered from an excess of their own indulgence, came as close as he had ever done to wishing that he could administer a dose of something permanently quieting to the man under his care. He would have had his apprentices tend Peltrasius and let them keep the payment, but he had ordered them to leave and, finally, on the third time of telling, they had done so.

More than he had ever imagined, he missed the fast wit of his clerk, the boy he had named Gaius, and the slower, more lugubrious care of Felix, the apprentice physician. Their absence left a gap in the life of his hospital that the healing of others did not fill.

He had not expected how much it would hurt when he had first asked them to go, standing with them at the open window of his second floor bedroom on the night the watchtower burned. Clothed in his nightrobe, his bare feet cool on the wooden floor, Theophilus had felt from them the awe and reverence of youths who think they know fire and war and are still young enough to worship both.

Theophilus was not inclined to worship anything, and would never stoop to advocating war; he had too many friends on both sides not to see the tragedy of it too clearly. He watched the ball of orange flame blossom into the night, and then the string of others as the watch-chain was needlessly lit, as if more fires were useful, or necessary to augment the message of the first.

Before the chain was complete, he had turned from the window, saying, “The Eceni are rising. It can be no-one else. They won’t attack here while the Ninth might come at their backs. We have some days to make ready. You should find your families and leave. Go north to the Eceni if you want to take part in their war. Go south to Caesaromagus or west to Verulamium if you would find sanctuary amongst the supporters of Rome.”

“And if we want to do neither? If we want to continue our studies with you? What should we do then?” Felix had asked it, the round, cheerful lad who had hands that could soothe a woman in childbirth as easily as they could support a man dying of flux or mend a youth crushed under falling masonry in the temple. His voice was softly resonant, and warm, like the flames that lit the horizon.

“He’ll tell us to leave anyway. There will be a siege and then a battle and he thinks it’s his duty to protect us from both, not the other way round.”

Gaius had answered before Theophilus had time. The clerk had grown in the last year and was tall as any of the other tribesmen, lean and stringy and long-faced with bright, sharp eyes that saw dust in corners and cleaned it even while he was revising in his head the rates charged for a night’s keep and bandaging and the additional percentage levied on a bill for setting a broken wrist because the one who came to pay had made the mistake of opening his purse and showing the quantity and colour of his gold.

That same sharp intellect showed as he offered one of his rare smiles, saying, “But we know it’s our duty to protect him. He can’t make us leave. If we choose to stay and face the Eceni at his side, there is nothing he can do to stop it.”

Which was true, and had remained true, and, for six days, they had resisted Theophilus’ pleas and his orders and his attempts at reason and had continued to tend the dwindling numbers of sick and injured and increasing numbers of food-poisoned who presented themselves at the hospital’s door and asked for help.

When Peltrasius began to scream and the rumours flew, they had washed their hands and donned their plain woollen robes without being asked and gone out in the evenings when the howls were at their height and done their best to persuade those who would listen that the man they could hear was very much alive and had no intention of becoming a ghost.

Sadly, as is the way of panic, the sight of them had fuelled more rumour so that soon there were reputed to be three ghosts of Cunobelin, or possibly the man and two of his sons, one who screamed and two others who moaned and murmured and touched passers-by with fingers of death. They gave up finally when a child they were treating for a broken finger swore in the names of two gods that his father had tried to attack one of the apparitions and his sword had passed straight through the ghost’s body and out the other side; the risks of someone’s trying to repeat that miracle in a population heading fast towards hysteria were too real.

Gaius and Felix had left, in the end, when the only ones who remained in Camulodunum were veterans and their families, or those who had given themselves so completely to Rome that they dared not leave. The two had come to Theophilus together on the seventh day after the burning began. Drawn and white, Gaius had said what was needed. “There is no-one left but us who does not support Rome. If we stay, we are supporting something that is insupportable. The Boudica is calling warriors to the place of the Heron’s Foot. If there’s war, she will need physicians. Would you come with us?”

Theophilus had known what they would say. Half the night, he had listened to them talk in the dormitory room two storeys below his. He had watched the moon rise and set and watched the glow of night fires on the horizon that showed how close the war host gathered. Listening to their feet climbing the stairs to find him, he had brought to mind the speech he had spent the night preparing.

He did not know how lined he looked, or how old, when he said, “I can’t leave a hospital while there is still someone in it. If the women recover, if Peltrasius passes his last stone, or his last breath, if no-one else has come to take their places, I will give thought to what I should do.”

They had expected as much. They would have killed Peltrasius for him, and perhaps tried to cover it up, but not the women. Felix had smiled through tears and said, “We brought you a gift, to remember us by.”

The thing was outside the door and they made him turn away while they brought it in between them. He thought it might be wine, or the smoked boar he had enjoyed before the fires began, or olives saved in a cold store from the last shipment in the autumn. For a moment, hearing a rasping breath, he thought it might be a hound whelp, and panicked, because he had never yet owned one and was not at all certain that he wanted to give his heart so completely and have it broken, as he had seen other men do.

It was not a hound, but a sword, and that was every bit as surprising. The blade was of middle length, a little shorter than was the fashion of the tribes, who fought alone from horseback, for the honour of it more than the killing, but longer than the legionary gladii that were fashioned to stab between the shields and so keep the integrity of the lines intact. The iron of the long-blade they gave him was burnished to mirror brightness and the hilt was of red copper and gold, in the shape of the Sun Hound, which had been the emblem of Cunobelin before his fall.

Theophilus felt his jaw hang slack. “I don’t…”

“You don’t know how to use it. We know.” Felix patted his arm. “But Peltrasius fought with the cavalry and he has spent his last ten years making a study of the ways the tribes fight. It’s a hobby of his. Get him to show you whenever he’s not howling. If you’re here when the Eceni arrive, you’ll need it, whichever side you decide to fight for.”

He had no intention of fighting for anyone. He had thought that obvious, not needing to be spoken aloud. He said, “You should know by now that I—”

Gaius put a cautious finger to his lips. “Don’t say it. Not here. Not now when the gods are listening. We don’t need to know.”

He had thought they had both abjured their gods, preferring the cool waters of rationality to the hot turbulence of faith. They were aching to go and it was not time to begin teaching all that he wanted to tell them. Lost in the pain of the moment, Theophilus held out his hands and they gave him the blade, laying it across his palms as if he were a warrior among the natives. Felix was weeping openly, which was usual. Gaius was wet-eyed, which was not. In Alexandrian, a little rustily, he said, “Father, whatever you have taught us, we will use well and for healing, not for harm.”

Theophilus bowed. “Then if Peltrasius dies, I can rest knowing it will not have been your doing.” It sounded too formal. He did not trust himself to smile.

They backed out, palms on their foreheads. Later in the same watch, he saw them leave, riding along the near-empty streets on horses bought for a year’s salary in gold from the quartermaster.

The hospital was too quiet with them gone, except when Peltrasius howled, when it was too loud. For the first time in his life, Theophilus the physician wished at least one of his patients dead and the other two mended without him.

At dusk, he made himself perform the tasks of both assistants, washed the women and fed them, saw to their water and the pots beneath their beds and gave them the infusions that had been standing half the day in his dispensary. He opened his stores, which had not yet been raided by desperate townsmen, and cooked a sparse meal for Peltrasius of field beans and barley with wild garlic to help the passing of the stones and carried the man a full ewer of tepid water in which to wash. He held him while he screamed and gave him poppy after, for the ease of them both.

He lit a small oil lamp and made the journey down to the cellars to draw more water from the well. The cold and the dark were as far removed from war and others’ pain as he could imagine. He cursed them mildly and set the lamp on the platform above the well. The light sent his own shadow dancing along the rough-plastered wall to where the first spider to escape Gaius’ watch was building a web. He watched it and the flittering shadows that joined it, and listened to the small scuff on the stone floor that was not a rat or a mouse.

Without turning, he said, “Greetings, Bán mac Eburovic, beloved of Mithras. I had expected you here by a more direct route, and sooner.”

The hair prickled on his scalp. He imagined a blade, drawn and advancing. When there was no more movement, nor any slicing cut to his back, he turned, slowly, keeping his hands in sight.

“My brother is outside,” said Breaca of the Eceni, from the far side of the well. “He is beloved of Nemain, too, now, not only Mithras. In both of their names, he will make sure we are not disturbed.”

It had not been easy for a brother and sister, soberly clad, to enter Camulodunum at dusk on the ninth night of the city’s siege, but equally, it had not been unduly hard.

The ditches and dykes that had protected Cunobelin’s steading in the days of his power were easily passed and not close to the city. The trenches and walls that had served the fortress of the XXth in the early years of its existence had been pulled down and filled in when it became instead a veterans’ colony. They were no barrier any longer, only a line of rubble with grass growing thinly through to show where it had been; an infant learning to walk could have stepped over to get into the city, or to leave it.

The streets had been less quiet than Breaca had imagined; looking down from the slope above the city, there had seemed few fires, and so few people out after dark, but she and Valerius had been stopped and challenged four times in the first hundred paces by groups of men who gathered by the dozen under the shaded light of tallow tapers and reed-bunched torches.

They were Roman for the most part: dark-haired, dark-skinned, dark-eyed veterans, closer to sixty than fifty, with flab at the belly where once-fitness had lapsed. Some talked animatedly, and only fell to silence when the newcomers were seen, but most had been building barricades or digging trenches against incoming horses and were more suspicious than their fellows. They stopped the strangers at blade point and demanded to know their business. Valerius answered shabbily, in Catuvellauni, and then stilted Latin, saying that he had come from the northern quarter of the town and was bringing his woman to see the physician. They let him go. Nobody asked him why.

There were women, too, under the tallow tapers, but fewer of those; young and underfed with the smoky grey eyes and red-blond hair of the Trinovantes, they were pregnant or nursing or with silent children at foot, gawping and shadowed by a fear they did not fully understand.

None of these chose to stop the pair of natives, dressed in the brown stuff of merchants with clan markings worked at the hem. Only a child, looking at them, had removed its fingers from its mouth and said, “Who’s that? Have they come to help us?”

She had spoken Latin with a tribal accent. Her mother had hushed her, saying, “They’re Catuvellauni, friends to Rome.” It had been hard to tell if she considered that friendship a good thing, or despicable.

They had abandoned the main thoroughfare shortly after that and taken to smaller streets with deeper shadows. A lone veteran with a drawn sword had challenged them in the first of those, his voice rusty with fear. Breaca answered this time, saying that she was suffering from bloody flux and stinging water and was being taken to the hospital for urgent treatment. The veteran backed away, making the sign against evil with his left hand.

The mention of flux had been more than a lucky guess; the smell of rancid faeces had been with them for a while now, mingling with the thin, scouring stench of fear that robbed Camulodunum of its heart. Once, the streets had stunk of life and vibrant feeding, now they smelled chiefly of rats’ urine and rotting vegetables. The smell stuck to the back of the throat and made slime on the tongue. Breaca put her hand to her nose and walked on. No-one else stopped them. Near by, echoing, a man began shrilly to scream.

Valerius tapped her shoulder, making her jump. “Left. Here.” His voice was light with half-suppressed laughter. She had heard him like that in Longinus’ company once or twice; whatever the danger, he was enjoying himself—perhaps because of the danger. She followed him into a street even smaller than the one they were on, barely wide enough to walk down without shuffling sideways, and then into a solid brick-built house camped improbably in a row of wattle and daub huts. Stepping inside, she nearly tripped over Valerius, who crouched in the middle of the floor.

Looking up, he said, “Help me lift this?” and she knelt, and did so.

There were two rings set into the floor, covered by an excess of dust and old straw. They took one each and pulled and a section of the floor came up smoothly on tallowed hinges so that it smelled meaty even while it hissed to vertical.

He said, “There are steps down. You could have light but it’s as easy to feel the way, and you’re less likely to risk being seen. There will be light in the well room if anyone is there. I’ll wait here and make sure you’re not followed. Shout if you need me. Theophilus will be surprised, but not, I think, discomfited.”

He had been right, of course, which was why she had asked him to come. One of the reasons why she had asked him. She had felt her way blindly along a short tunnel of rammed earth and into a cellar of neatly fitted stones, as flat and smooth as any in the Forum or other buildings of state. Further along, they were layered with plaster and white lime that flaked off under her fingers. Then a flame had flickered in the dense black ahead, and an old friend had trodden on the pavings, muttering and breaking wind, who had no reason to consider himself overheard.

She had scuffed her foot to let him know she was there, believing it necessary for his pride, and he had thought she was Valerius, which was probably reasonable. Unreasonably, she was angry that he had not known her better.

She answered him too sharply, and was sorry and he saw both of these. She had forgotten his prescience; he could read her almost as clearly as Airmid, and perhaps in some places better because he was not so close, nor blinded by love.

“Breaca?” He reached out and drew her forward into the lamplight. His hand was on her shoulder, and then he had turned her and was running long, lean fingers across the span of her back, which was not a good thing at all. Her flesh cringed from his touch as it had not done from Airmid’s, who knew her.

She made herself stand still, not to insult him. He was delicate and adroit in his investigating. He stopped quite soon and took his hands back to himself. If she kept her eyes closed, or her back turned, his voice was ageless and belied the weariness she had seen on his face under the probing light of his oil lamp.

Quite steadily, he said, “Have you come to me in my role as physician? Airmid has done well by you, but a true healing of the soul takes longer than the healing of the body and even that is barely begun.”

She turned to face him, trying not to be angry again. “Is it so obvious? Or did the veterans tell of all that they did over cups of wine when they came back?”

“Both.” He shrugged an apology. His face was long and lined and grey under the haphazard orange of the lamp’s flame. “The veterans sang of it over their wine for the few days before the siege began when they thought themselves safe and needed something to banish the disgrace they had suffered at Corvus’ hands. They sang of a legionary flogging inflicted on a woman of the Eceni, and then, when the wine hit, they sang also of the irreparable damage done to your daughters, for which I cannot express enough sorrow. But of you, I would have known the most of it as soon as I saw you, from the keening and black wind in your soul which is there to be heard by someone who knows how to hear it. Your brother was much the same; that’s why I mistook you. You must grant me that much in my craft: I can hear the mourning of what has been lost. Would you have me lie and pretend ignorance to my friends?”

He was her friend. He had sent warning of the procurator and so saved the war host at a time when discovery would have destroyed it. Before that, he had been friend to Airmid and Graine, to Cunomar and to Corvus, who had loved—who still loved—Valerius, and was loved by him. He had helped her in the killing of Efnís, when it had needed to be cleanly done. For all of these, and basic decency, she owed him honesty.

The rim of the well was of rough stone, with fish-tailed goats stamped head to tail into the mortar on the flat surface. Breaca sat beside one and traced the curled and scaled tail with her finger.

She said, “Valerius has come into himself as a healer, as well as a dreamer. There are things he can do that Airmid cannot, and things she can do that he will never aspire to, but still—”

“But still, you are trying to fight a war when your soul is broken apart and your body does not yet answer the commands of your mind. And yet, however damaged, you are here and your warriors are camped within sight of the city and nightly Trinovantes who are loyal to you wreak havoc with what attempts are made at forming defences. The veterans dig trenches against your horses and the youths and children of this city fill them in; the Romans build barricades and they are torn down before dawn. Two nights ago, the statue to Victory was pulled from her plinth; a thing of marble, bigger than you and I together and yet nobody heard it fall. A man was hanged for that. The two veterans who hanged him are dead now. If you wait, Camulodunum will fall to mutiny and insurrection without a blade raised against your warriors. Is that what you plan?”

“Not entirely. We will wait a little longer, but not indefinitely; I would not have innocent men hanged on my account. And I have warriors who need to learn to fight. The scouts say you had reinforcements sent from the west. Is it true?”

“Partly. We have two hundred mercenaries who marched up from the port at Vespasian’s Bridge when the watchtowers first burned. They came on the pay of an Atrebatan glass merchant who keeps a villa here. A quarter of them have the bloody flux. Fifty more have counted the numbers of your warriors’ watch fires and have handed back their pay to their employer. They’ll leave in the morning if your warriors will let them out as they have let out everyone else who has attempted to leave. The rest will fight, I believe, as will the veterans. Then there are two or three thousand Trinovantes who swear they are loyal to Rome and will fight against your war host. I believe perhaps half of them may be telling the truth.”

He had better manners than to look at her for an answer. Breaca studied the workings of the well. The bucket was of waxed pigskin, held agape with a loop of iron at the mouth. The rope from it led up to a pulley and an assortment of wheels and it was not immediately obvious how it might be lowered and then raised again. Examining it, she said, “About half, yes. And those who will fight against us are known by those who will not. Many will be dead before—Is that one of your patients?”

The scream died away, echoing from floor to ceiling.

“Indeed.” Theophilus grinned, fleetingly. “You will have to take my word for it that his health is improving. But if you were to listen on the streets, you would hear that the ghost of Cunobelin walks again and seeks vengeance for the desecration of his tomb. This, too, does not speak well for the defence of our city. If you will allow me—”

He reached past her to the well’s mechanism. “An Alexandrian friend made it when he was stranded here for the winter. It is designed to be effortless to use for an old man with limbs not as supple as they once were. I take it as a gift, grown out of a magnificent intellect, not an insult.”

The physician wound a handle and three sets of cogs turned. The bucket disappeared jerkily into the dark beyond the lamplight. A while passed, and they heard it hit water. Theophilus said, “If you turn the handle beside you, it will rise again.”

She did, and felt the almost-weightlessness and thought, obscurely, that Cunomar would have enjoyed the mechanics of it. She thought, also, that Theophilus had given her more information than she would ever have asked for and ought not be pushed further on the weaknesses in Camulodunum’s defence. She had not come, after all, to extract from him details of defences that could be seen in the streets. She had not come intending to ask him for healing, either, but he had spoken of it and Airmid before him and there had been time to think between.

Winding slowly, she said, “When Dubornos came back from Rome, he told me of Xenophon, who was your teacher. Valerius has some tales of him also. He seemed…a very learned physician.”

“He was. And I was, indeed, his pupil in my younger days. If you are asking whether I have his skills, then no, there are things he took to his grave that none of his pupils will ever know. If you’re asking if I know some things he did not, then yes, I believe I do. The winter I spent as your guest in Airmid’s company was worth years of learning. You need to stop winding now, and move the brake onto the handle. Then I swing this lever—so—and the bucket moves towards us. You see? Effortless.”

The bucket tilted a little and slopped water onto the floor. The smell of it rose chalky and cool. Theophilus stepped back into darkness and returned bearing two beakers in green glass with gems set round the rim.

Seeing her look, he grimaced. “I took four of these in payment for a difficult childbirth. It’s not generally considered wise for a physician to question the good taste of a first-time father. Particularly not if that man is the Atrebatan sub-chief who controls all the trade in glassware from here to the southern sea ports and has command of two hundred mercenaries. In those days, his men were young and well armed and did not have flux, nor were they queuing at the gates to go home. Would you drink water with me, in spite of the colour of the glass? I regret that I have no ale and would not insult you with Rome’s wine.”

She accepted his water. Regarding her over the rim of his beaker, he said, “And so I ask again, have you come to me for healing?”

“I came to ask if you would leave Camulodunum before we burn it to the ground; I would not see you dead by any act of mine. But now that I am here and you have made the offer, then yes, I would be glad of whatever healing is possible. Certainly, I am not fit to fight long as I am.”

His face was green behind the glass. She thought she read a sudden encompassing peace, as she saw sometimes in Airmid when her craft had been best used and gave most joy: at the end of a hard birthing, perhaps, or when a warrior had been brought back to health from battle wounds that had seemed fatal.

For that moment, she saw all of his soul, then a part of him withdrew and something else she could not reach came to the fore. That part explored her as his fingers had done, but more deeply, so that she felt flayed again and had to hold the edge of the well to stay upright.

She stood rigid, drinking water and looking down at the fish-tailed goats through green glass. After a while, when her beaker was empty and he had still not spoken, she looked up. Theophilus was weeping, silently, and holding the glass to hide it so that green tears rolled down green cheeks.

He was not a warrior and the glass was not a shield, nor need it be. Softly, she said, “Speak to me. Whatever it is, I can hear it from you.”

He drew a long, unsteady breath. “Breaca of the Eceni, it would be the culmination of a life’s work to heal you.”

She wanted that. She had not known how badly she wanted it until she heard it said. Still, Theophilus was weeping.

She was a warrior, if no longer the best; she had never backed away from hurt. Through a cold dread that grew in her chest, she said, “But you can’t.”

“But it may take longer than you can give. The damage within you was not only done in one afternoon, however badly you were treated. Airmid knows this, and Valerius. To heal you now would mean undoing the hurts of a lifetime and that will not be easy or fast; the wounds are not only physical, and the ones to your heart and soul are deeper than anything done to your body. Have you spoken to Valerius, to ask how long his healing took? Does he even know it was done?”

Breaca had not considered that. Thinking back to her brother’s long tales at her fever-side, she said, “His father, Luain mac Calma, demanded a year of him, and he gave it.”

She knew herself gaunt and would not hide it behind the green glass. Carefully, she placed the beaker on the floor beside the well where it would not be knocked over and break. She felt oddly hollow, as if the gap in her soul had come to the front of her chest, and was wide open to the night.

“How long would you need?” she asked.

His face softened. He had no idea how like her father he looked. He said, “Luain mac Calma is Elder of Mona. He has resources we can only begin to imagine, but then your brother’s wounding ran deeper than yours, I think, and was different in its nature. If I say that I would need to be with you, waking and sleeping—particularly sleeping—in no other company from now until mid-summer and possibly beyond, would you give that much? Could you?”

He was not a strategist, but he had lived amongst military men for all of his adult life. He had seen the watchtowers burn and could count the fires of the war host as easily as any other man, and so estimate the size of her army. He knew the distance to Mona and the disposition of the legions. From all these things and more, he had known her answer before he asked the question. It was why he had wept.

Breaca stood in silence. After a moment, when the ache in her chest became leaden and too heavy to be borne, she sat down on the rim of the well.

Theophilus said, “I’m sorry. Wait here,” and was gone. She listened as the scuff of his feet on the stone faded to nothing. The oil lamp guttered and went out while he was away.

He tutted when he returned, and left again and came back with new light, which was, by then, unwelcome.

“My dear, oh, my dear—”

Breaca could weep after all, it seemed, and having started, the tears would not stop, even when she was no longer alone, but held in the care of a foreign man, before whom it should have been easier to show weakness, but was not.

She heard his knees crack and the echo off the walls, then he was kneeling and his hands were round her shoulders, taking proper care of her back so that she tilted forward and her head was in the crook of his neck, smelling the sweat and the man-smell which was father-smell and the smokes of strange fires, and she could weep there, muffled by the white linen of his robes, and her tears, running freely, could merge into racking, bucking sobs as they had not done since childhood, and perhaps not then.

Her body heaved and she thought she might be sick and tried to find some control again, breathing fast and hard through her teeth.

“Breaca, Breaca…”

His chin was on her head, so that his voice filtered in through her hair. He patted her cheek and stroked it with his finger and when his hand came away wet and slimed with mucus, he did not wipe it on the cloth at his belt. Instead, he held a beaker to her lips, a simple one of clay, not bejewelled glass, and tilted the contents to her mouth.

She tasted and drank and it was not poppy or vervain or hound-wort or any of the others she feared. It hit her somewhere under her diaphragm and the sobbing started afresh. She held her breath, to try to stop it.

Theophilus shook her, like a father with his child. “Will you not let yourself be weak, even for this? Let go, woman. Weep if you need to weep; scream if you need to. No-one but me will hear it and if they do, they will think it Peltrasius, or the ghost of Cunobelin, whichever takes their fancy. When did you last sleep? A proper sleep, not drugged or fevered or beset by dreams of war?”

A new voice said, “When she was twelve, I would think, before her mother died, although there might have been some nights on Mona with Caradoc, or more recently with Airmid, when she let herself forget.”

There was a silence, in which only the unsteady rise of her breathing could be heard.

Breaca said, “Valerius?”

He was somewhere out of sight to her left. She heard him with the same disembodied clarity as she had done in the fevers, but she was not fevered now, only drowning in despair. The lamp was all wrong and her vision was blurred with tears.

Her brother took her hand; she would never mistake his touch for anyone else’s. His fingers were cool and dry and steady.

He said, “My father spent a year working day and night on my healing, even when I did not know he was doing it. As Theophilus will tell you, I am not fully healed, but better than I was. If you want it, we can make that time for you.”

Breaca had control of herself again. Her brother’s presence had done that, or Theophilus’ draught, or simply time to breathe and to step back from the brink of the void that threatened to consume her. She pushed herself clear of both men and leaned against the wall beneath the newly filled oil lamp.

Valerius sat with his back to the mechanism of the well, watching her with the same tact he had used in the battle against the IXth and before that, when he had fought her in the clearing by Briga’s altar, as if too much scrutiny might break her.

He might have been right. As one who has run to the point of exhaustion, she said, “Then who will lead the war host if I am gone for six months? Who will keep Cunomar in check and stop the she-bears from launching more assaults before we’re ready? Who will keep Cygfa alive long enough for her to lead the right flank if it comes to a full battle, when all her instinct is to kill and keep killing, whatever the risk to herself? Who will talk in council with the war leaders of the Coritani, of the Dobunni, the Durotriges, the Dumnonii, the Silures, the Brigantes, the Ordovices, the Atrebates if they choose to side with us? Who has exchanged gifts with them these past twenty years, who has given them guest-place at council fires and sat at theirs, who has led their people into battle and won for them so that they will join now and fight together, whatever the old tribal frictions? If you can give me a name that I can believe in, I promise you, I will be gone.”

Valerius was her brother. He sustained her gaze for longer than most men, and when he looked down, it was to pick up and study the glass beaker with the gems set at its rim. With the green light warping his fingers, he said, “No-one else can do all of that. I know of no-one else who would want to try.”

“Then why offer what you cannot give? Where is the kindness in that?”

“I didn’t say we couldn’t give it, I said it couldn’t be done by one person alone. There are people who can do each part of it if they have to: Cunomar is learning self-control and leadership, Cygfa is finding reasons to live beyond each battle, Ardacos is devoted to the destruction of Rome, and he can talk to the tribal leaders. Each of these can play a part, but none of them is the Boudica, who can do them all and fire the warriors in battle to stretch beyond their limits.”

“Any one of you can do that.”

“No. I saw you fight against the Ninth and you were not as you should be, but still the warriors around you came alive. In your presence, they fight as one; without you, they are green youths, each fighting their own small battles. You don’t see this because for you it has been like this for years, but those of us who watch can see it, and can fear the moment when you break, and it breaks with you. It’s the Boudica that makes the war host what it is. We need you for that, Breaca, but we need you whole or we are broken with you. Not yet, perhaps, but soon, we will reach a time when having you with us in body, but not in soul, is worse than not having you at all.”

“Why has no-one said this before?”

“Arrogance?” He did not look arrogant. He looked like a man driven to the edges of his own being. “We thought we could heal you. And then we thought that being in battle would heal you. And then we thought that Graine going to safety would heal you. Even as late as today, we thought that Airmid, in and of herself, might heal you. We were wrong. What else is there to say?”

Theophilus was there, with a hand on her arm. She felt him as if her body belonged to a stranger. Her voice was empty. “Perhaps I needed to know this. If I were to take part in my own healing, could it be done faster? In a day? In two days? In ten? We could perhaps spare that long before we burn Camulodunum and all who are in it.”

Her brother pressed his thumb to a ruby. It came away with the imprint white in the flesh. He said, “To heal at all, you need first to understand what is lost and why. I know of no fast way that might be done.” He balanced the beaker with care on the rim of the well and looked up. “Theophilus? Do the physicians of Athens and Cos have an answer?”

“You could sleep for a night in the temple of Aesclepius, but that is half a year’s journey from here and in any case I doubt if it would suffice. Beyond that…I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can offer that will give the speed you require. I did not speak lightly: I will give six months of my life to your healing and think in that time I can do it. I know of no way it can be done in less.”

There was silence, and time to think, and to sift the possible from the impossible, and find a way to go on.

Theophilus was sitting still where she had left him with his knees drawn up and his elbows perched on them in a way that undid entirely the dignity of his white robes. Breaca came to stand, and then to sit, before him. She did not touch him, but was close enough to feel the quiet heat of his skin.

“That you can think of it, and are prepared to give it time, is a greater gift than I could have asked for. It is not your fault, or mine, that I can’t accept. We will both know that the will was there, and perhaps return to it one day. Meanwhile, I came to ask a different gift, one that is not impossible. The morning will bring war, if not this morning, or the tenth from now, then soon. Would you come with us to safety? Nothing will be asked of you; it is only that we owe you everything and would not repay it with death.”

“That, too, is impossible.” Theophilus shook his head. “I can’t leave here now. The hospital has three patients. By tomorrow’s dawn, it may have more. I made an oath, once, never to abandon them. I would not break that simply to save my own life. If they all leave, or if it’s clear that by staying I can do them no good, then, yes, I will follow my apprentices to your camp, but that may not happen before you attack. We should be clear that the decision to stay is mine. I absolve you of all harm that may come of it, to me or my hospital.”

The screaming began again in the room above, rising in pitch and volume, as if the afflicted patient did not need to pause for breath.

Theophilus stood. “You see? How could I leave a man in such pain? You should go. If I can, I will join you. If not, then your gods, perhaps, will guide the outcome.”

He gripped them both along the forearm, hand to elbow, as warriors did before battle. His face was smooth with age and exhaustion, his eyes infinitely wise. “Whatever happens, I have lived well and my life has been richer for knowing you. I would not have it otherwise. Go, and build the war that you must and make sure that in winning it you each find a way to be whole, or all this is for nothing.”