Dreaming the Serpent Spear by Manda Scott Read Free Book Online Page A

of Camulodunum and west to the Roman governor of Britannia in his assault on Mona and all that was sacred.
    Under the wane of it, Breaca said to Valerius, “I should talk to them. Could you find a way to help me mount the horse? It’ll be easier from there.”
    The messenger’s horse was a pale strawberry roan, trained to stand where its rider had fallen. It remained steady while Valerius knelt at its side and spread his officer’s cloak wide, and removed his helmet with deliberate ceremony andoffered his knee for Breaca to mount so that it looked to the watching warriors as if they had arranged it ahead to show how Rome must kneel before the Boudica’s greater strength.
    They cheered for that as well, and gave her time again to catch her breath.
    She looked better mounted; she had always fought best on horseback. The morning sun caught the copper of her hair and set light to it so that even sick-grey and slick with the sweat of old fevers, with the mist leaching the colour from the air and a pale-washed horse beneath her, she shone as the watchers expected.
    What followed had not been prepared at all, except that each of those who had cared for Breaca had imagined something like this, and had prayed for it, and had come ready to act if the moment allowed.
    Thus, Airmid lifted up the torc of the Eceni, which had been saved from the procurator’s looting, and set it about Breaca’s neck so that it, too, caught the sun and blazed gold, marking her as royal and, more than that, lending her the strength of her lineage. Ardacos gave her a new shield painted with the mark of the serpent-spear in red on Eceni blue and Valerius passed her the blade with the serpent-spear hilt that they had retrieved from beneath Briga’s altar.
    “Warriors of the war host, you who have gathered in the name of victory …”
    She could not be heard by the full five thousand, no-one expected that, but she sent her words to reach the oath-holders and spear-leaders and clan chiefs who stood as of right in the front lines of the massed host and could be relied on to repeat her message, word for word, to their followers.
    “As you know, the legionaries of the Twentieth have been ordered out of Camulodunum and are marching west to aid the governor’s war against Mona. The time is ripe now to attack the city that Rome claims as her capital in our land. We have only to rid ourselves first of the Ninth legion, the legionaries who wait in their fortress to the north and will move swiftly to attack us at the first word of insurrection…”
    It was better than Valerius had dared hope. He stepped back from the horse and listened to a woman who was barely fit to fight a full day’s battle nevertheless speak of leading five thousand untrained warriors to war and victory as if these two were certain; who, better than that, was able to reduce to a few, crisp, god-filled sentences the arguments of half the previous night and make them sound as if they were planned policy, as if Cunomar’s act of madness, and the risks that followed from it, were part of a strategy set in motion months, if not years, in advance.
    “… my son Cunomar, who had the honour to strike the first blows of this war…”
    She stretched out her arm and Cunomar came to stand beside his mother, a tall, lean youth, made taller by the hand’s length of lime-stiffened hair set straight up from his head. He wore only a waist skin held in place by his knife belt and the marks of the she-bear were freshly painted about his body. Even for those who knew the ways of the bear cult, he stood apart as something new and different, or possibly very old, which was worth more.
    The loss of his ear was part of that difference. He was no longer beautiful in the way he had been when Valerius knew him in Rome and Gaul. Then, he had been a bitter, clumsy child, living in the shadow of his father’sgenius, for ever striving to match the legend, not the reality. His beauty had been of the fragile kind