Dreaming the Serpent Spear by Manda Scott Read Free Book Online

she said, “Valerius of the Eceni, I trust you with my life.”

CHAPTER 4
    V ALERIUS STOPPED THE MESSENGER. BREACA KILLED HIM. Sedge grass swayed over the dead man’s face, pushed by the dawn wind. A skein of geese mourned him thinly, forlorn echoes strung across the grey sky. Where he lay at the edge of the marsh, the air was fresh with spring and the hope of freedom. To the east where the watchtowers smouldered, greasy smoke stained the skyline, delivering the smell of charred bodies onto the wind.
    Valerius lowered the body down from the horse, taking care not to break the seal on the message pouch. The messenger had been young and his face held no fear; he had believed Valerius a friend, for the red cloak that he wore and the officer’s plume in his helmet and his easy, urbane, soldier’s Latin that had offered security and a better route past the wet fenland with the marsh to one side and forest to the other and only an open unprotected pathway for a man alone to ride through.
    He had been terrified because all five of his companions had died to Dubornos’ slingstones and Ardacos’ bear-spearsand he was alone and in need of a friendly face. Calling his welcome and his relief, he had not known death was close until it claimed him. His soul had departed quickly, called to freedom by the cries of the geese.
    Behind, nearly five thousand warriors of the Eceni, with a smattering of others from as far north as the Caledonii and as far south as the Durotriges, stepped out of the forest. Their line extended from the marsh to the far horizon, a glitter of bright blades and spears and round, painted shields and the occasional shimmer of cavalry mail or legionary armour, stolen from other dead men of Rome.
    They were as diverse as any group of warriors: their hair was red gold and bronze, with the occasional dark throwback to the ancestors, and braided high at the temple and left without ornament to show they had not yet killed in battle. Very few wore helmets; the Boudica did not, and never had done, and they had gathered in her name, answering her call, holding fast to the belief in her immortality, even when the rumours spread of her sickness and closeness to death.
    She was not dead. She had killed a man cleanly in sight of them all, reversing in a single stroke their waning hope of the past thirteen days. That stroke may have lacked the brilliance that had always set the Boudica apart from the greater mass of warriors, but there were few amongst those watching who had the experience to understand the distinction between the mundane and the truly great, and fewer still who could see such a thing in the flash of a knife across a man’s throat.
    Valerius was one of those few, but he had already seen all that he needed in the brief contest by the gods’ pool.The details of that were something private between them, shared only in outline with those of her closest circle who knew already the reality of what Breaca could do and what she could not, which was the greater part.
    The challenge for all of them was to find ways to keep her alive until she could find her way back to who she had been; or it became clear that she would never do so. They had not yet spoken openly of that.
    The warriors of the war host, who saw exactly as much as they were shown, stood in silence at first, in honour of the dead, and the gods’ gift of the morning and the shedding of blood that signalled the start of the war for which they had gathered and trained. Then a woman among them raised her blade in one hand and her shield in the other and set up the war chant of the Boudica, that the oldest had heard first on the banks of the great river at the time of the legions’ invasion and the youngest had only heard sung quietly, in secret, through all the years since.
    The sound grew and grew and spread out across the marsh, silencing the wind and the geese, and became a roar that might have reached north to the IXth legion and south to the veterans