Dreaming the Bull (8 page)

What?

One does not gape at a governor’s son even if his father has just proposed an act of monstrous insanity before which a junior officer’s personal concerns are rendered so trivial as to be meaningless.

Valerius found a wall behind him and leaned against it. With great care, he said, “The governor is very new to the province—he has been here less than one full day. He arrives at a time of great disquiet and it is certain that the Silures and their allies have timed their uprising to coincide with his predecessor’s departure so that—”

“We know that. The war chief Caradoc plans his strategies as if Caesar himself were advising him. What we do not know is what the eastern tribes will do if we confiscate their weapons. I understand that you have some
experience of life amongst the natives and may therefore be in a unique position to tell us.”

Too many betrayals crowded Valerius’ brain. From the far side of the room, Corvus said, “Tribune, that’s unfair. Valerius is a duplicarius and only newly that. Were he a full decurion, he would not feel able to answer honestly now that you have told him the plan is the governor’s. Even I would only say this in private, but you have to believe me that the tribes will fight for their weapons as hard as any Roman would, possibly more so. Valerius would tell you the same if he had leave.”

“Then I give him leave. Duplicarius, I put you on notice that the discussion taking place in this room is private and I caution you not to repeat any part of it beyond these walls or in other company. Do I have your oath that this is so?”

Valerius nodded. “You do.” What else could he say? He had seen men at swordpoint given more freedom to move.

“Good, then I am similarly bound. I may give my father my advice based on your information and that of the prefect, but I will not reveal its source. Therefore you are free to answer as you believe. In fact, I command you to do so. What will the tribes do if we require them to give up their weapons?”

A man’s career could fall on such as this. When it is all that he has left, such a thing matters a great deal. Valerius took a steadying breath. Letting it out, he said, “If you disarm them, without question they will rebel.”

“Why?”

Images jostled for space in the crowded morass of his mind, none of them Roman, none of them suitable for a governor’s son. Selecting the few he could readily present to
tutored Latin sensibilities, Valerius said, “To the tribes, a warrior’s blade is a living thing, as precious as a hound or a well-trained battle mount, not simply because of its worth as a weapon but because it carries the dream of the one who wields it, the essence of the true self that only the gods know. In the sword resides the quality of the warrior’s courage, the honour, the pride, the humanity, the generosity of spirit—or lack of it. If it is a blade of the ancestors, passed down from father to daughter, from mother to son, then it carries also the ancestors’—”

“Stop. ‘From father to daughter, from mother to son’?”

They were not doe-eyes. The governor’s son was a pitiless black-eyed falcon and his eyes promised swift death to all who scuttled under their gaze. Quietly he said, “A centurion of the Second legion has been demoted to the ranks and twelve of his men flogged for stating in reports and under questioning that a woman led the greater mass of the Siluran warriors in their attack on the westernmost fort and that other women fought at her side. I questioned the men myself and they would not change their accounts. The governor believes this to be the fantasy of defeated minds. Was he right?”

Longinus had asked much the same question but he could safely be ignored where a governor’s son could not.
Her mark is the serpent-spear, painted in living blood … Yours could have matched it, the horse or the hare
…

Valerius would not—could not—look at Corvus. A name burned the air between them and was not to be spoken under any circumstances. In a voice that strained for normality and fell so very short, he said, “The governor is always right.”

He heard the silence crack.

“So he was wrong.”

Marcus Ostorius Scapula paced the length of the room. With his face to the far wall and his hands locked behind him, he said, “You were explaining why the eastern tribes will rebel if disarmed. If I understand you aright, they value their weapons as amongst their most prized possessions and if we were to confiscate these blades—if we were, say, to have a smith break them on an anvil in full sight of their people—we would cause them great pain as well as diminishing their capacity to rebel. Am I correct?”

“You would as well crucify their children.”

“It may come to that.”

The young man turned. He was not, after all, entirely without pity, one could read it on his face, but he was the son of the man who had taken command of a province expecting at least a winter’s peace and had first to achieve it. Sitting, Marcus Ostorius leaned forward, placed his elbows on his knees and made of his fingers a steep-sided tent that tapped a slow rhythm on his lips.

“You will know that there has been insurrection in the lands north of here in the last half month. Two forts have been destroyed by the Eceni and a unit of the Twentieth was forced to seek refuge here in the fortress. The governor has two choices. He can order the decimation of the two cohorts that fled in the face of the enemy as punishment for their cowardice, or he can subjugate the tribes as punishment for the uprising and as a means to prevent its repeat. Which of these would you advise him to choose?”

Valerius did gape then. Even Corvus shifted in his chair. With exaggerated deference the prefect said, “Decimation,
tribune? Is the governor truly considering this?” Scapula’s reputation, ferocious as it was, had not extended that far.

Scapula’s only son smiled tightly. “He is. It may be he needs to do both, but I think not. Decimation hasn’t been practised since the time of the Republic. To order it now would send a message to the four legions of Britannia that they had better fear my father than the tribes who would attack them. The sad truth is that both the tribunes and the legates who have command now are new to their posts; it is not certain the men would obey an order to beat to death one in ten of their comrades. It isn’t something we would wish to test in current circumstances. The only alternative is to subdue the local tribes without delay. We cannot fight a war in the west if there is a risk that the east will rise at our back. Camulodunum must be made secure.”

Camulodunum.
He named it Camul’s dun, home to the war god of the Trinovantes, not Cunobelin’s dun, as it had been before. All of the Romans had done so since they first arrived, as if told this was its name. No-one living had considered it expedient to tell them otherwise.

Valerius did not correct him now. The perpetual knot in his gut was shifting and changing, coming alive with a flaring admixture of fear and anticipation. Whispers of raw terror traced lines up his spine and with them a spark that blazed bright as the god’s light and promised the blessed oblivion of battle. He had seen too little of that, these last four years.

Thoughtfully, he asked, “You have two thousand veterans in Camulodunum who have been promised land when they retire. Whose land will they be given to farm?”

Marcus Ostorius answered, “The Trinovantes’. Once
the colony is formed, this place becomes an extension of Rome, at which point the natives will no longer have any legal claim to any of their land.”

He said it as if the facts were obvious, which they were not.

Stiffly—later, one could think unwillingly—Corvus said, “Valerius … in Rome, only citizens may own land. Only one of the Trinovantes has been made a citizen, and he will retain his steading. The rest of the population automatically forfeits all land rights. It may be that the new governor will choose to recompense the families for their loss but he is not required to do so.”

The rumours had said as much, but sane men did not believe them. Gripping his hands together to keep them still, Valerius said, “In that case, you have no choice but to disarm the tribes immediately, to crush them completely using utmost force. Those who have half a mind to rebel will do so but if you make examples of them, harshly, the rest may subside. They will loathe us for it, but they loathe us anyway. We have more to lose than their high opinion.”

He was no longer obeying orders, but the dictates of his body. The rising hairs on his neck and the sweeping heat and cold in his belly and the clash of weapons and the far-off cries of the wounded were both a memory and a premonition. He did not know the ways in which his face changed as he spoke but he felt the stir in the air and when he finally removed his gaze from the blank wall on which battles had been fought and lost, he found that it drifted, without his will, to Corvus’ face. The concern he read there surprised him. Still, it was Marcus Ostorius, the governor’s son, who
spoke. His voice was quiet, as it might be were he speaking in the presence of one who slept and must not be wakened.

“Why must we crush them so completely, Valerius?”

“Because in taking their land, you are taking their livelihood. They can live without weapons, they know that even if their pride won’t let them admit it, but they can’t live without the means to eat. If the Twentieth departs and the Trinovantes are still in possession of their weapons when the veterans begin to take their fields, their cattle, their grain, then you will have no colony by the end of winter and the war here in the east will make the one happening now in the west look like a petty skirmish. If the veterans are to have any hope of survival, you must confiscate all of the natives’ weapons, punishing everyone who resists, or you must kill them all down to the last child at the breast. Those are your only choices.”

“It is in my mind that a people faced with death or slavery as their only choices are not readily going to relinquish war.”

Longinus said it, five days later, standing on the rotting ice of the river. The Thracian’s horses, who were, indeed, his brothers, but no more than that, had drunk from holes chipped at the water’s edge and were pawing holes in the snow to graze. The mounts of Valerius’ troop mingled with them as they had done since the afternoon of their first meeting.

With their charges safe, the two horsemasters had sought a wager that was hard enough to make a satisfying win while still being within the bounds of possibility and, at a stretch, of personal safety. The treacherous, melting ice had provided the answer. Each man was halfway to winning, or losing, when Longinus brought up the topic of the governor’s speech.

It was a diversionary tactic, designed to throw Valerius off his count, and the Thracian took care to check the length of the river in both directions before he spoke. Longinus might have been rash, even ridiculously prone to personal risk, but he was not stupid.

The governor had not ordered decimation, but three men had been flogged for sedition and none had questioned the wisdom of Scapula’s tactics in the west as explicitly as Longinus. Still, the mutterings continued. The disarming of the eastern tribes had been accepted readily by the ranks; they were safer if the barbarians around the fortress were stripped of their weapons. The governor’s inaugural speech, given in the freezing hall of the
praetoria,
had made them far more restless. Scapula was not a man to take his orders lightly. He had been instructed to make the west safe and he had determined that the best way to do so was to extinguish the entire tribe of the Silures. Nothing of such severity had been practised in the province since the invasion, or even threatened. It was all too easy to imagine the response of the western warriors when faced with the reality of a governor who had sworn to kill every man, woman and child of their tribe.

Longinus rocked on the ice and spread his arms for balance. “You know them,” he said. “Will the Silures let us kill their men and enslave their women and children as he has promised?”

Valerius said, “If they do, it will be the first time in the history of their people. Only the Ordovices are more savage and if they are united with the Silures, nothing we can do will stop them. And then as soon as word gets out of the governor’s threat, the other tribes who might have been unsure of Rome’s enmity will believe the dreamers who tell them we come to destroy them all.”

This, too, was subversion, but no worse than what had gone before and it did not put Valerius off his counting. He leaned on a many-pronged hazel stump that had been cut
long and left as a tethering post. With one hand, he tapped the rhythm of his heartbeat on the nearest stump. Out on the river, Longinus did the same, although his beat was noticeably faster. The Thracian stood rock-steady on the chalky ice with his feet planted squarely on either side of a crack the width of his fist. He had bet that the ice would hold his weight for the count of fifty heartbeats. In accepting, Valerius had not thought to specify whose heart should define the counting. He still believed he would win.

Longinus said, “So what you are saying is that the governor has given the dreamers a gift and done nothing to … that’s it … forty-nine … fifty…
Now!
”

He leaped a spear’s length forward onto the bank. Where his right foot had been, an ice plate no thicker than a man’s thumb tilted sideways into sluggish water. He looked up, grinning his triumph. “The falcon-headed dagger is mine, I believe?”

The knife was small, of a length to fit in the palm of the hand and not be seen. A small Horus adorned the end of it, subtly carved, with tiny beads of jet as its eyes. It had been a gift from Corvus in their days on the Rhine when the invasion of Britannia had been a fiction, a joke men shared at Caligula’s expense. Once, it had mattered to Valerius that he keep the blade. Now, he reversed it so that the handle faced the Thracian and then spun it high with an added twist so that to catch it unharmed was, in itself, an achievement.

Smiling, Longinus reached out and snatched the thing from the air. If he knew that Corvus, prefect of the Quinta Gallorum, took the falcon god as his personal emblem, he did not remark upon it. Sitting on the hard-packed snow, he said, “When the governor first made his speech, I had hopes
that the western tribes might never come to hear of it. Since then, however, I have been drinking in the sewer taverns that you recommended. The word in the bottom of the wine cups is that the enemy dreamers can send their spirits as white birds to fly on the wind and that a single word, carelessly spoken, will be carried back to those who guide them. Is it true?”