Dreaming the Eagle (66 page)

The leader’s horse was a bay of strong Gaulish blood, well trained to steadiness in battle. Breaca marked it in her mind as she dragged her blade from the neck of its rider and turned to confront the remaining enemy. Their numbers were thinning fast. Hail and the grey mare killed one of the Roman hunters between them and Breaca took his Gaulish shieldmate with her blade. Her palm thrilled to the action, but only mildly. It was the second ambush of the day, the sixth since the legions had first landed; killing came easily. The air hung thick with the moans of the dying and the stench of lifeblood and voided faeces and she barely noticed. Two of the hunters closest to the edge tried to escape up the slope into the wood and found themselves facing Braint, who had abandoned her horse in the valley and run through the trees to outflank them. Shock slowed their reflexes - they had never faced a woman in battle - and they died before they had time to think past the impossibility of it. The wheaten-haired warrior of the Coritani hailed the girl for her first taste of true Roman blood. She saluted, grinning, and bent to cut a lock of hair from each of the dead men, adding them to her bulging belt pouch before running down the slope to help with the rounding up of the enemy’s horses.

When all was clear, the enemy dead were dragged to the wood’s edge and skewered to the tree trunks with their own spears, their throats cut and their manhood severed in warning. The Coritani youth stripped the shirt from the leader and carved the sign of the serpent-spear on his chest. Breaca saw it and did nothing to stop him. It had been done five times before.

The remaining Roman weapons were divided amongst the warriors. The grey cloaks of Mona left as they had come, silently, on padded feet. Behind them, carrion birds were already gathering. Far back towards the coast, the smoke of a thousand campfires stained the sky.

A small stream ran on the far side of the beech wood. They dismounted beside it and washed themselves, and ate goat’s cheese wrapped in nettle leaves and cold meat that had been a gift from a family of northern Atrebates. Breaca sat with Hail at her feet and bathed a graze on his foreleg. He pressed his head on her arm with the teeth tight against her skin and crooned as he did when they were playing. She found it hard to remember a time before she had loved him and he her. She closed the wound with spiders’ webs and fed him meat from her saddlebag. Downstream, Ardacos tended to one of the honour guard who bled from a spear-wound above the knee. Others bathed their own wounds or stood in the stream with their sword hands immersed in the water to take down the heat and swelling of the battle. Dubornos, once of the Eceni and now of Mona, brought a flask of water and came to sit at her side.

‘There were more this time,’ he said, ‘and they were better armed than the last. The next group will be greater still.’

It was not an accusation; that was no longer his way. Dubornos was one of those she had chosen to make up the honour guard’s strength, recognizing the change in him. It had begun immediately after the battle with Amminios, in which Dubornos had brought disgrace on himself and his family by feigning death in the face of the enemy. Because of it, he had been the first of those to change and the one in whom the difference was most marked. In shame, he had renounced his warrior’s spear on the first night of their return and had pledged himself to hunting and the provision of food for the people. Later, when eyes were elsewhere, he had given away his gold ornaments and his styled cloaks to the families of the dead and had taken to wearing coarse-woven wool and a single armband made from the pelt of the red fox which was his dream, although he had paid it no heed before. He had become a good hunter, but no-one remarked upon it. Then, in the spring before Breaca had been chosen Warrior, he had gone to Macha with a dream and she had named him a singer and sent him west to Mona for training.

He had been there nearly a year before Breaca had noticed him. In the autumn after her choosing, on her return from the Sun Hound’s funeral, Maroc had asked her to school the singers in use of weapons and she had found that the singer of the Eceni was also a fighter of quietly consummate skill. He fought without arrogance with no wish to win, and so won against all but the few whom the gods had set apart as true warriors. In the wake of the victory over Berikos, she had chosen him as one of eight to make up the numbers of the honour guard. She had never regretted it. On the battlefield, he fought with a controlled passion, selflessly. Off it, he sang as well as Gunovic, and possibly - although Breaca was not the best to judge - as well as Graine. In council, Breaca trusted his judgement.

She accepted the water he offered and let it wash the taint of blood from her throat.

‘You think we should not be doing this?’ she asked.

‘No. It is necessary. It pricks their morale and makes them realize they are in enemy territory; it deprives them of food so they must live off the sea, and each one dead is one less to fight when the army moves against us.’

‘But?’

‘But we are thirty and most carry wounds. We should know in advance the numbers against which an ambush will not succeed and be prepared for it. There are some amongst us who would die for the chance to kill another Roman.’

‘Braint?’ It was obvious. Breaca had seen it before, and again in the flanking move on the two Roman hunters.

He nodded. ‘And, I think, Ardacos. He has taken the invasion as a personal affront.’

‘He understands what they will do if they gain a foothold. He will not be alone in that.’

‘No. But that is the reason we cannot afford to lose him.’

They looked along the stream. Ardacos finished his bandaging and rose smoothly to his feet. More than ever, the last few days had made clear how strongly ran the blood of the ancestors in him, in the lithe movements and the fierce, unyielding battle anger.

Watching him, Breaca felt her heart lift. For nearly a year after Berikos’ defeat they had been lovers and she still felt the world brighter in his presence.

He caught her eye now and, smiling, she raised a hand to beckon him over - and stopped because his gaze had moved beyond hers and his face grown still. She turned. Braint was running at her without caution or quiet, waving her arms to show danger. When they were close enough to hear her over the song of the stream, she straggled to a halt, saying, ‘They’re coming. I saw their standards from the top of the rise.’ ‘Who are coming?

‘The legions, the cavalry, the Gauls, the Germans … all of them. They’ve struck camp and they’re moving west.’ She looked up. Her eyes were wild with hate and impotent anger. ‘They are thousands. Tens of thousands. The line goes back all the way to the sea. We can’t stand against them.’

A shadow passed over the group. Dubornos made the sign against evil. The girl paled and put her hand to her mouth. ‘I meant, we who are here cannot’

Breaca put a hand on her arm. ‘I know what you meant. We can stand against them only if we stand together. We have always known this. Call the others to mount. We will go back and join Caradoc and his warriors at the eel-spate.’

The eel-spate was the largest river the Romans had to cross as they moved in from their landing on the far eastern coast. Tides moved at its mouth making the land treacherous on either side but it narrowed quickly so that, by half a morning’s ride inland, there was a place where a horse could ford it easily and a warrior standing on one side could cast a spear to the other and expect to make a kill. It was the obvious place for the legions to cross and Caradoc and his mixed troop of Catuvellauni and Ordovices had been preparing there since news of the first Roman landings. He had not brought them all, by any means; if the warriors of both tribes were counted together they came to over five thousand and he had brought less than a thousand, enough to guard a river crossing but not so many that if they were overwhelmed they would weaken the main force. To these was added the bulk of the warriors of Mona, acting under his orders; they would not be separated from their Warrior, except for minor skirmishes.

In all, the defenders made nearly three thousand and they had been working for three days without break. The result was as good as it could be, better than Breaca had expected. Riding down from the hills behind, she could see the rows of fire-hardened stakes that reared out of the water to point at the enemy. Boulders as big as swine littered both banks, making a cavalry nightmare of the terrain so that no horseman could readily approach the water for a spear’s throw on either side of the ford. Mats of woven branches covered narrow trenches that would delay both infantry and horse. Behind the defenders, a long wooded hill stretched to the south and west, making a wall at their backs and hiding their full strength, or lack of it.

Breaca had led her thirty across the river far upstream and looped back to come down through the trees. Emerging now, she saw below her mounted warriors racing their horses along the western bank, hurling shouts and taunts at the enemy. She barely looked at them. On the far side, the army of Rome was gathering. So many men, so well armed, so rigidly disciplined; it was easy to see why Braint had lost her courage on seeing them for the first time. Rank upon rank, line upon line, six deep in their centuries, the first two cohorts of the XIV th and XX th legions waited, resting on their javelins, easing their swords in their sheaths. Rain pearled on shoulder and helm, making jewels of dulled metal, creating uniformity where it might otherwise have been lacking. They were inhuman - or Breaca would have thought so, had she not slain a score of their brethren in the morning.

The legions saw her as she rode out of the trees, halfway down the hill. A murmur rippled down the line, growing to a growl. Not inhuman then, but prone to fear and anger. She grinned, savagely, and hoped they saw it. They would have found the ruined carcasses of their dead on their way here. There had been no survivors to tell of the tall, copper-haired warrior and her grey-cloaked killers but she was known from the earlier attacks and the mark cut on the chests of the dead had been the same, like the message it left. You will die here and go to your gods unwhole. Leave us.

In case they should doubt it, she moved her shield to her right arm so that, coming down the hill with the trees to her left, the sign of the serpent-spear would be plainly seen. Behind her, the thirty of her honour guard did the same. She raised her spear above her head and saw the flicker of iron as the gesture was repeated along the line. Hail ran ahead of her, head and tail high, a war hound greater than anything Rome could offer. He was her living memory of Ban and she used him, as she had done on Mona, to strike the spark of loathing and anger that could be directed at Rome as easily as at Amminios and that became, as it grew within her, the certainty of victory. She felt the mantle of it settle on the honour guard and spread to the warriors beneath her so that the swarms of activity paused and became instead a carpet of upturned faces, and raised spears and blades that flashed in the light and promised death to the enemy.

On the opposite bank, the growl grew. Men began to hammer their blade-hilts on their shields. A pattering noise rose over the music of the stream, like hail on sheet iron, gathering strength. At the far left of the Roman cavalry, a blackhaired man in the chequered cloak of the Atrebates tugged at the sleeve of a mounted commander and pointed. Breaca threw up her arm and made a sign in the air as she had seen Maroc do, naming the Atrebatan a traitor and marking him for Briga. The man flinched and fell back, shielding his face as if she had flung stones across the water. The rattle of sword-hilts became a wall of sound, like the roar of a battlefield. Breaca set her teeth and grinned and felt her spear leap in her hand like a live thing. The grey mare raised her head and screamed, as a colt might, giving battle.

Caradoc met her at the foot of the slope. He, too, was leaner and browner than he had been at the meeting on the salt marshes, and even in the rain his hair shone star-gold as if lit from within. He still bore the colours of the Ordovices; the white cloak fell from his shoulders, part covering the stolen mail shirt she had sent him after the first skirmish, and swept back across the haunches of the bay cavalry horse that had been the mount of the Gaulish leader killed earlier in the day. She had sent this latter on with the scouts who had ridden to him directly after; a gift because his own dun colt had been killed beneath him, but also a further warning to the enemy: We have fought against you and won. We are ahead of you, at your sides and behind. Nowhere are you safe. Go home.

He had understood, as she had known he would. Even before she reached him, she heard the familiar voice, dryly amused, with the edge of danger to it that she had known in battle against Berikos and earlier, in a river, swimming against the current. ‘Breaca, welcome. The horse is perfection itself, thank you. Rome knows what it has lost.’

The knot of his honour guard parted to let her through. The drizzle plastered the gold threads of his hair to his forehead. His eyes sparked, like fire struck from flint. He, too, had waited four years for this. He offered her the hand-clasp of a brother for his sister and she returned it, gladly. In this, they were as kin, fighting a common evil. Parting, he studied her without rancour. ‘You look as you did on Mona, on the night of the choosing. Do you feel it?’

She grinned. ‘A little. Enough for today, and whatever comes after it.’ She did not burn as she had on Mona - the rain, or the presence of the legions, or the will of the gods damped the edges of it - but it was enough; she felt that in her marrow. Those who had known the real thing would feel that - Caradoc and Ardacos and Gwyddhien and the others of the first thirty who followed her. For the rest, word had already passed that the Warrior of Mona had come, bringing the wildfire, and that Rome could not prevail. Above all else, she wanted the enemy to know that, and to feel fear from the start. Glancing down at the stolen cavalry mount, she said, ‘I’m glad they recognize their horse. Does he ride as well as he looks?’

‘Better. Airmid says the hurt of his loss and his presence with us will change the course of a battle. Was his rider of high rank?’