CHAPTER 20

The battle for the city of Camulodunum began in thunder, with god-spears of lightning dancing across the gilded roof tiles and rain falling in unbroken sheets from the ocean of the sky.

Cunomar’s she-bears opened the assault, for the honour of it and because they fought on foot and could pass safely over treacherous ground in the pre-dawn dark when mounted warriors could not.

Naked, bearing no lights, drenched under continuous rain, they ran in a wave of silent destruction down the long slope to the city, across pasture land still muddied from the winter herds, past ploughed furrows ready for the spring sowing, under the Victory arch and past the empty plinth of Victory’s statue with the fragments of its breaking still scattered on the pathway below, and on to the first of the trenches that had been dug across the trackways to cripple the incoming horses.

As they had for the past five nights, retired Roman veterans of the XXth legion stood guard over the trenches to protect them against the gangs of youths and children who came in the night to undo their labours of the previous day. Men in late middle age who had thought their night-guard days long behind them had drawn lots from a legionary helmet in the old ways of their service, and grumbled when they lost.

They had stood through the night and were tired and hungry and nervous of wandering ghosts and the more tangible threats of insurgent youths and the warriors whose fires had lit the hillsides through the night and then, very suddenly, had all been put out.

The night guards had been watching that, and shouting questions one to the other, when the rain had come and the crushing thunder. They were no longer young men, to stand out in the rain overnight; they had backed away into shelter, staring out into the blinding emptiness of the deserted city that became, just as suddenly, not at all deserted, but full of death, smiling, with sharp knives.

Wet and befuddled, they died without fuss. Their bodies helped to fill the trenches they had guarded, and were soon covered over with mud and rubble so that horses could pass over the places where they had been.

A small, unmanned barricade stood within the trench line, built of stone rubble and timber and parts of villas recently abandoned. With the trenches made safe, the she-bear ran on and began to dismantle it.

Dawn came slowly, clouded by the rain. Cunomar worked with his bare hands, hauling broken bricks and whole sections of plastered wattle to the side of the path. At some point, he realized that the dark was no longer complete, and that he could see the shape of Ulla nearby.

Her dark hair was plastered to her head so that the ends met underneath her chin and white lime paint that had swirled on her arms and shoulders instead puddled grittily in the creases of her elbows. A smear of it streaked her face across the bridge of her nose, highlighting the shape of her face. It would have been easy for Cunomar to imagine her a ghost if his fears had leaned that way. She grinned at him and they lifted a roof beam together and got splinters in their palms and stood for a moment, teasing them out with their teeth.

She was close enough for him to smell her sweat, to see the smear of her spit around her mouth and on her palm before the rain washed it off. Lightning flashed and she was silver suddenly, laughing. In the gap before the thunder, she put a hand to Cunomar’s one ear and shouted over the drumming rain, “We’ll never light signal fires in this weather, the wood’s too wet. You’ll need to get the flag on a roof somewhere.”

“I know.”

The storm was moving away. There was a longer gap between the light and the sound. Cunomar had time to shout that much back into Ulla’s ear and then the gods crashed the clouds together and the noise drowned out all talking. He tapped her arm and felt her follow where he led.

With the other she-bears around them, they ran north and a little east to a substantial, brick-built house that had clay tiles on the roof, not the gilded bronze of the villas around them. The outer wall was high enough to be useful, but not too high to climb. Cunomar had noted it from the hillside in the early part of three days’ watching and was uncommonly pleased to find it not yet demolished, as so many of the outer buildings had been, to make a barrier to protect the inner city.

Ulla saw the possibility as he had done. She said, “It will make a good place to raise the banner to the Boudica; and a better one to watch the battle for where we are most needed.”

“Yes.”

He was coming to expect her to think as he thought, even to depend on it. She had been the same when they lifted the roof beam from the barricade, and before that, filling the trench, and before that in endless small ways through the days of planning. Something had changed since the annihilation of the IXth; more than the flogging, or the winter in training, the act of having killed together in battle had brought them together as true shield-mates. The old songs spoke of it. Cunomar had seen it in his mother and her relationship with Caradoc and, later, with Cygfa.

As a child, watching, he had thought he understood. Now, in the heart of the storm with the ghosts of the dead walking openly towards the gods, with living men set to kill them a spear’s throw away, with the war host on the slope awaiting his signal, it came to him that this was a door opening into a new world, that he was standing on the threshold looking in, and that it was somewhere he badly wanted to go. He thought of Eneit, who was dead, and knew that the same door had opened there, and that for all of his life a part of him would regret having closed it when he did.

“Ulla—”

“Later. We can talk on it later.” She was no longer grinning. Her eyes were obscured by the rain and poor light and too hard to see, but her face was still and open and it seemed that his thinking had carried her with him—or that hers had carried him, and she had reached this place first.

He said, “Know that I care for you, and need you in battle.”

“I do.” A grin in the lightning. “And you have to go up now, and set the banner, or we’ll be too late.”

She braced her feet wide and set her shoulders to the wall and linked her hands to make a stirrup. Cunomar took a pace back then vaulted up, stepping lightly on her shoulder in passing. His toes smeared mud on her skin and the ball of his foot slipped sideways but he was already gone, grappling for the guttering and the tiles beyond, pressing his palms on wet clay, pushing up and up, thinking of the bear to find the power for the climb, swinging his legs up to catch a purchase, and then he really was up, standing on the sloping roof with the rain bouncing to knee height, hard as hail, and the wild wind lifting his hair in spite of the wet and the city spreading dark beneath the storm, with light only within the ring of the solid inner barricade that protected the heart of the city, where families kept night fires burning in the hearth for warmth and light and the illusion of safety.

The roof tiles were greased with moss. Water hissed past his feet, flowing over the guttering. Spreading his toes wide, he stood upright, feeling the tug of the wind and the power of the rain. The gods sent to Cunomar a distant roll of thunder and he shouted his own name, and then his mother’s and then the first eight names of the she-bear into the retreating dark.

The wind caught the words and tore them apart, but the rain had lessened enough to let him untie the flag from his waist and tie it again to the stick Ulla passed up to him, so that when the last flicker of lightning came to scorch the sky and raise steam from the bronze tiles on a neighbouring roof, he knew without question that his mother and her warriors could see him and the serpent-spear in red on Eceni blue that he waved, and the bear’s pawprint in white in the lower left-hand corner, for the heart of the she-bear in whose light he lived.

The war host came in a storm of hooves and baying hounds. There was no need for secrecy now, if there had ever been. They blew horns and clashed their blades on their shields and some had thought to bring tinder in clay pots and lit brands of pitch and resin and tallow all bound about with sheep’s wool so that they burned in spite of the rain and the tide of horses was sparked here and there with the fire they brought to Camulodunum.

They ringed the city and moved in slowly through the deserted streets. The horses churned wet mud to slurry and the trackways became trickling streams under the last of the rain. The height and breadth of the inner barricade halted them. Whole houses had been demolished to make it, and the bodies of hanged men lay in the foundations, to lend the strength of their bones to its holding.

The enemy gathered in growing numbers within the safety of its ring. Cunomar could see them from his vantage point on the rooftop; men in old armour scurrying from house to house, shouting in Latin and Trinovante, calling up the Atrebatan mercenaries, paid for with a merchant’s gold, and the last remaining tribal residents of the city who had kept loyal to Rome.

Cunomar held his flag aloft until the first horses were within reach of the barrier. His mother rode past him with Cygfa riding as shield-mate on her left, as she had done so often on Mona after Caradoc was gone.

With newly opened eyes, Cunomar saw the shadow dragging at his mother’s flame, but he saw, too, the tilt of Breaca’s head, the beaten bronze of her hair, made dark by the rain, saw the shift in her weight as she lifted her sword and the stiffness that came from the unhealed wounds in her back—and he saw with a generous heart the matching movements from Cygfa as she kept cover on the Boudica.

For the first time in his life, Cunomar understood how his sister shifted her weight on her horse a fraction, to come in on the left so that her body made an extra shield for Breaca, and how this was done without thought on either part, but was simply the way that they rode into battle.

Something small and sweet pierced him, like the song of a lark on a moorland, and he knew that he had found by accident something unique, shared with only a few, and that if he had coveted it any sooner, the yearning alone would have killed him.

It was good to be adult and see these things. He looked around for others he knew in the seething tide of riders, and saw the pair-links or lack of them and the way that they fought. Valerius and his Thracian cavalryman, blessedly, were out of sight: further back or coming in from the south, leaving the east to Ardacos who had led his own hand-picked warriors in from the eastern gate, closest to the Temple of Claudius, which was easily the most defensible building in the city and therefore the best guarded. There, the inner barricades were made of poured mortar and the streets had been scattered with iron spikes against the warriors’ horses.

In the west, where Cunomar stood on his rooftop, the fighting began in earnest as the Boudica’s warriors dismounted, leaving their horses to stand in the mud while they began to search out the weaknesses in the barrier. There were few places open to assault, but gateways had been left for the Roman veterans who had kept night guard on the trenches and they were hard to close effectively from the inside.

Cunomar watched a gaggle of young warriors group into a wedge opposite one of these openings. From his vantage point, he could see the Atrebatan mercenaries and Roman veterans gather on the inside. The Atrebatans carried hunting spears, broad-bladed and long with a cross-piece at the neck that kept a boar from charging up the haft but could equally be used to hook a shield from the arm of an unwary, untested warrior.

A great many of the warriors with the Boudica were untested; those who had taken part in the annihilation of the IXth and so considered themselves battle-hardened were with Ardacos or Valerius coming in from other angles. The youths whom Cunomar watched forming their wedge had done so once in practice and never against a real opponent. The men waiting within the barrier sensed it and their line became visibly more solid.

Ulla was beneath the villa still, waiting. She looked up as Cunomar hissed her name and grinned at what he said. Five other she-bears were within reach: Scerros and his girl cousin and the three others knit most closely to the Boudica’s son. They did not consider themselves battle-hardened—they had seen the Boudica fight before her wounding and seen Valerius afterwards and they knew exactly how much experience they lacked—but they had spent the winter training with Ardacos and Gunovar in the use of the knife and not one of them was unscarred or unsure of where lay the line between living and dying.

They were fit, too, and able to vault easily up on the stirrup of Ulla’s linked hands to the rooftop. She came last, pulled by Cunomar himself who lay on his belly with two of the others holding his ankles so that he could grasp her wrists and haul her bodily up.

They were armed only with knives, and the storm no longer hid them. Cunomar jammed the haft of his flagpole in a crack between two tiles and then, stooping low, led them at a run across the rooftops, jumping from green-mossed clay to the brilliant verdigris of bronze and then, more delicately and with prayers to the bear, onto a single-pitched thatch roof with a roof beam that was barely more than a stick and swayed as they ran across it.

Before he left the gilded roof, Cunomar had seen his mother reach the barricade and turn right, towards the south, where a greater opening had shown itself. Since then, she had been out of sight. For the first time in several years, he was very glad he could neither see her nor be seen in battle; very badly, he did not want the Boudica to rescue this particular group of untried youths at this particular breach in the barricade.

A midden gave an easy, if pungent, route from the rooftops down to the ground. Cunomar grabbed a handful of thatch as he left the roof and used it to clean the filth from his feet and calves as the others joined him.

They were in an alleyway, within the circle of the barricade. To their right, two groups of eight men stood with their square-sided Roman shields held edge to edge in two equal lines before the opening in the barricade. One on the right gave an order in Latin and they drew their swords. They were not Roman, but mercenaries, men of the Atrebates whose grand-elders had fought against Julius Caesar. In two generations, they had taken on the weapons and language of Rome.

Cunomar cursed them, softly, and with rising elation. Dawn was real now, and the weather easing. The air was no longer a single sheet of rain. He and his few she-bears were alone behind a wall that sheltered thousands of the enemy; death was a word or a breath away. Its promise was glorious, but life and victory were more glorious still.

Ulla tapped his forearm. “We can’t take them as we did in the forest; they’ll see us.”

“There are spare javelins beyond where they’re standing.” He had seen them from the rooftop. “You and I need to go to the far side to get them, the other three stay on this side. Wait for the wedge to hit.”

They waited. The youths outside the barricade were chanting the name of the Boudica. At a certain point, when the noise had gathered their courage for them, they charged forward, all on foot.

Cunomar heard the barked Latin, and the names of Jupiter, Mars Ultor and the horned god spoken in Atrebatan, and saw the first line of mercenaries lean their shoulders against their shields and hold them secure while their comrades stabbed from behind with javelins, aiming for the faces and eyes of the youths who came at them, shouting war cries.

Screaming, the youths died, as it had been clear from the start that they would. At the height of it, Cunomar dodged left and then right, out of the alley. The javelins he sought lay loosed from their bundles, with the binding thongs ready cut so the men could reach for them cleanly.

Cunomar picked up two, one in each hand. He was at the far end of the mercenaries’ row. The man nearest him was at full stretch, his javelin buried in the face of a young girl warrior. He saw the shadow coming for him and cursed and tried to pull free and, failing, jumped back and reached for his sword. The javelin took his throat, uncleanly, because he was still turning. Ulla struck past.

Because the man at whom she aimed was turning, because Cunomar was in the way and was unbalanced, because a man was thrashing his way to death near her feet, she missed and the force of her strike carried her, too, off balance.

Cunomar saw the lift of her shoulder and heard her short, stifled oath. He saw her brown skin, almost washed clean of the lime paint, and the rugged red-white lines of the scars on her back from the flogging—a thing he had almost forgotten and had contrived not to see in any of them for days now—and saw her stumble towards the man he had killed—who was not yet dead.

In the same slow, water-logged movement, he saw death come at her as the dying man raised his sword. He had no need to put strength into the thrust, only hold it still, at breast height, and let her fall onto it, as she was doing, slowly, liquidly, inexorably.

“Ulla, no!”

Cunomar had not known that he could scream so, nor that he cared as much. Death was beautiful and glorious and he had no intention of letting his newly discovered shield-mate find glory in the heart of the she-bear this soon.

He was off balance, but not as badly as she was, and, in the trapped time of too many futures, the god allowed him to move, allowed him to slew sideways and stretch out his arm and push her away in her headlong flight so that she came up against the man she had tried to kill, and the wicked, honed iron of the upheld blade scored instead along the inside of Cunomar’s thigh and out again, missing his testes by the thickness of one night’s sharpening.

They were in battle and could not stop. Cunomar’s man had died, and Ulla’s had not, until he was taken from behind by Scerros’ girl cousin, whose name was Adedomara, or Mara when they were in battle and there was no time to shout anything that took longer than a breath.

“Mara! Right!” There was no time, and an Atrebatan on her right whose brother was dying because of her.

Scerros took him, striking low and angling up, to pierce the muscle of his thigh and, by luck although he would later claim it as skill, the great pumping vessel of the man’s thigh that pulsed gouts of bright blood in time to his dying heartbeat. Two others struck and if none of them made clean kills their men went down and were no longer a danger.

They were still seven against twelve and those men shielded and armoured and ready now, turning away from the gap, but for three left to hold it, who had only to place their shields at the barricade’s opening and lean on them and those outside could not reach past. The other nine made a wedge of their own, properly, and levelled their gladii and came forward at a half-run, aiming to split the straggling line of Cunomar’s she-bears in half.

“Bears! Break on the wedge!”

They had practised this only once. Valerius had insisted on it when they looked down from the hillside and watched the retired veterans drilling with the Atrebatan mercenaries in the square before the forum. When Cunomar had resisted, Ardacos had taken Valerius’ side. “The veterans are old; they’re not stupid. The time to find out how to act is now, not when they have drawn up in formation against you.”

The she-bears had done as was asked of them then and they did it again now, not smoothly, but well enough, so that the Atrebatans ran onto nothing but the side of a timber warehouse and those in the front had to swerve to one side and the greater bulk behind had to slow for fear of crushing them.

Valerius had said the legions could reverse a wedge and come back again in any direction at the shout of a single command, or the lifting note of a trumpet. These men were not Roman; they had not trained through a dozen winters in all weathers and all manoeuvres. That fact alone kept the she-bears alive.

It was hard to think clearly, to consider tactics when the blood was underfoot and the air sharp with fear-sweat. Cunomar sprinted left and felt Ulla and Mara with him. Scerros was on the other side of the wedge with three of their seven—their six; one was down, cut in the side by a passing blade. There was no time to see who it was, only that it was not Ulla or Mara and that Scerros, terrified, was running the wrong way.

The barricade made a safe wall to protect their backs. Cunomar reached it and raised his stolen javelin.

“On me!” His voice reached over the screams of the wounded. Ulla and Mara came to him and faced the mercenaries, who might not have been able to reverse a wedge, but were more than able to stand together in line and had done so and were waiting now, looking sideways along the street, holding their shields linked, unshaken, laughing, waiting…

“There are veterans coming down past the house where you left your flag.” Ulla said it, quietly. Cunomar could feel her heat, smell her sweat, and her unconcern with dying. She had nearly died. He had saved her. These things came to him separately, unconnected.

She glanced at him, fleetingly, without fear. “We could make the line of the bear. If we’re going to die, it should be to best effect.”

No-one who had stood in the line of the bear had ever survived to tell of it after. Each warrior marked a circle in the dirt or on the turf and was oath-sworn not to leave it, except to attack bodily the nearest of the enemy, with hands and teeth and knife, using flesh and bone as the foil to trap the enemy’s blade, so that, in dying, at least one ghost would be their companion in the journey through the other-forests to the heart of the she-bear to whom their souls were given.

Scerros was nowhere to be seen. The other three were close enough to hear the idea. They were afraid and courageous together and were already looking at Ulla as if she had joined the bear and become part of the mystery. Cunomar felt a fierce, unexpected pride, for himself, for the others, most especially for Ulla. For the first time in his life, he knew that he had something to live for that mattered more than proving himself in the eyes of his mother and Ardacos.

Cygfa’s voice rang distant in his head, separated by time and war: A leader sees the greater picture and knows that lives matter more than glory. He had known she was right when she said it; as with the shield-mates, understanding was different and ran far deeper. Urgently, he wanted to stop the battle, to find his sister and tell her that he had finally understood.

There was no time; as Ulla had said, a company of Roman veterans was coming and the three who held the breach in the barricade behind him had beaten back the youths of the wedge. For the she-bears trapped on the wrong side of the wall, there was nowhere to go—except up.

“Up!” Stepping back to set his shoulders to the wall, Cunomar slid his knife into his belt and looped his fingers. He shouted at them, over the howling of warriors. “Over the barricade! On my shoulders, as we did with the flag.”

Ulla saw and understood; she was his shield-mate and soul-mate. She joined him and shouted at Mara. “Go now, before they see!”

Already the mercenaries were moving, breaking the line to run forward, surprised as much as cheated; Eceni warriors never left the heart of battle—never.

The Boudica had done so, once, to save the children. The children were left now to save themselves—and were hesitating. Mara stood still, numb, not knowing what to do. Cunomar yelled, “In the name of the bear, save yourselves! Ulla, go first.”

Mara was moving. Ulla would never leave him, he could see that. He had no power to order her, and no time. The mercenaries were within reach. He gave up, and took his knife and said so they could all hear, “No, you’re right. We’ll make the line of the bear.”

He was going to die. There were things he should do, invocations he should speak, hidden names of the bear he should hold in the forefront of his mind, where instead was the memory of Ulla, clad in lightning, laughing, and the first of the Atrebatan mercenaries coming in lazily, grinning, wall-eyed and flat-nosed with his blade held out in front of him, with no idea at all that he was about to kill the Boudica’s son.

Cunomar spoke in his mind the ninth, secret, name of the she-bear, and felt his knife blade slip in the sweat of his hand and cursed, because there was only one chance to kill, and felt the mud warmly wet between his toes with another man’s blood and remembered all the things that he loved in life, all at once, in a rush.

He stepped forward, bunching his muscles, and fixed his mind and his heart on the throat of the man who came at him so that it became the whole of his world, and a fitting target. At the end, he was amazed at the power of the terror he felt, and how it lifted him past everything else, soaring.

Soaring still, he made his leap.

The noise was extraordinary. In the middle of it, he heard someone shouting his name. He thought it was Cygfa and wished he had made amends with her and knew that he would have to wait in the lands beyond life, because he was dying and had not yet made his knife stroke, which was strange, because the wall-eyed mercenary was no longer grinning and there was more blood between Cunomar’s toes when he landed on mud and not on the body of the man at whose throat he had aimed. He stumbled and put a hand out and felt iron slice across his fingers and swore.

A shadow passed over him. “Here! Take it, damn you, there are forty of them coming. Take the blade and do something useful with it.”

It was Cygfa, looking just like their father, and beautiful. Dumbly, Cunomar took the blade she thrust at him. There was still no possible way to escape. He felt Ulla at his shoulder and did not know if he should be glad they would make the crossing and come to the bear together or sad that she had not survived to see more of the wonder of life.

Cygfa said, “Move to the right; let the others through. We need even numbers.”

He did as he was told, because nothing made sense and the bear would be hunting for him. He waited to feel the pull of the forest and used the time to follow Ulla and Cygfa in a spider-scuttle to their right, so that more shadows could come out of the gateway behind him and make a line, and then another.

The incoming warriors were not of the she-bear. They did not fight naked and only with a knife, but clothed in leather and stolen chain armour with shields and long-swords and some of them with stolen legionary helmets.

He recognized warriors he had see fight against the legions in the west. Braint was there, who had been Cygfa’s lover in the days before their captivity in Rome, and was Warrior of Mona, with all the responsibilities of that rank; she had no reason, nor any means, to be here.

Others stepped into line alongside her, men and women who had fought in the invasion battles against the first influx of the legions and fled with the Boudica and Caradoc to Mona, to keep up the resistance there. They were as well drilled as the legionary veterans; more so because they had spent all their winters training and had not sunk into the wine vats of retirement in their twilight years.

They made a line, with Cunomar at the end of it. Ulla said, “I would be your shield, as Cygfa is for your mother. Will you honour me and accept it?”

He said, “It should be the other way round. You have the courage. I was slow and followed your lead.”

Ulla grinned. The crease it made in her cheeks was the last place where the white lime paint stayed. “You brought us to this,” she said. “If we die now, it will be in the best company. Half the warriors of Mona are here.”

It was too late to argue. The veterans slowed and steadied and made the same decision. The two lines stood for a moment apart in mutual recognition and then, surging equally forward, met in a cacophony of broken bone and buckled armour. Ulla became his shield. They fought together, with Cygfa always on the edge of their vision, bright-haired and brilliant, fighting with Braint for the first time since she was taken as prisoner to Rome.

Partway through, when the dead began visibly to rise, it came to Cunomar that he was not going to die and that this was a thing to celebrate, and that he could only do that fully when the line of veterans was gone and their city rested free under the Boudica’s banner. The shock and numbness left him, and he soared instead on new fear, one that transmuted into true battle fever, and that was the third new thing that came to him on the first day of Camulodunum’s battle.

He fought and killed and was hit and felt nothing and saved Ulla and was saved by her and saw the dead walk all around them and felt each breath in a gift from the gods and each breath out his gift to them of continued living, and of fighting, and of killing, and of friendship.

They came to rest near the timber warehouse, with the winnowed crop of veterans behind them, the fallen made surely dead by a knife-cut to the throat.

Exhaustion lay on them, so that it was impossible to imagine lifting a blade one more time, or raising a shield, or fending off a thrust. Speech was a thing to be imagined, for later. Shield-mates thanked those who had saved them with a nod and a croak. Wounded warriors bound the wounds of others hurt more deeply.

Someone passed round a goatskin of water. It was branded on one side with the serpent-spear and on the other with the heron of the Elder of Mona. Cunomar drank and passed it to his right, where Cygfa was leaning on her shield, laughing breathlessly at something someone else had said. She caught her brother’s eye and sobered a little.

“That was good. We hadn’t thought this would be the first breach. Breaca will be proud of you.”

He had forgotten his mother. There was a time when his own need to be seen would have kept her in his vision through any battle. He turned to look, and so found that the gap in the barricade which had been narrow enough for two men to defend easily had widened and was being made wider by youths from the war host who had organized themselves into teams and were dismantling the barriers far faster than the veterans had erected them.

Somewhere at the back of the milling crowds were horses and somewhere within them was his mother. Breaca had mud smeared across her face so that it looked like a darker version of the she-bear paint. She was gaunt-faced and hollow-eyed but she caught him looking and smiled back and when Cunomar had pushed his way through the gap to reach her, he read in her face the same kind of pride that he had felt for Ulla, and had never truly seen before

The braids at her left temple had come loose, pulled by the weight of the kill-feathers woven within them. She tugged one free and held it out. It was black, with a gold band about the quill for uncounted numbers of Romans slain.

“You should have this,” she said. “I never tried to make a bear line with four warriors in the face of forty legionaries.”

Cunomar felt himself flush. “You would never have been so foolish as to allow the warriors who followed you to be cornered with no alternative. A good leader sees ahead the dangers that will come.”

She eyed him a long time and smiled a little at the end of it. “A good leader sees the way out of trouble and can make it happen. Perhaps my warriors would have listened to me and gone over the wall when I told them. That will come with time. It can’t be forced. Even so, it was a good idea.”

That was true, and he knew it, and it had been his idea, not Ulla’s. It was harder than he had ever imagined to accept the praise he had yearned for, freely given and deserved. He took the feather and did not try to hide the shake in his hands.

He had no hair at the sides of his temples in which to braid it; he had shaved off an arc above his missing ear, and then again on the other side, for balance. He wove his mother’s feather into the queue that remained at the back. Around him, warriors he had known since childhood stopped to watch. He felt the weight of their experience and remembered what they had known of him in his youth, and regretted it.

“I don’t understand,” he said to his mother. “Why is Braint here, and the warriors of Mona?”

Breaca waited until the feather had been fixed and fell flat against the back of his head. When she spoke, it was wryly, so that she sounded like Valerius and it was hard to tell if the irony was tinged with humour or frustration.

“Because Luain mac Calma sent them to us having decided that the war here had more need of trained warriors than his own war in the west. He has the full body of dreamers there, all soaked in the power of the gods’ island, and he has Graine, who has joined him. How could the legions possibly prevail against that?”