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

that graced the Roman salons, so that only those who wished the best for him could have said there was a promise of strength at the core.
    Valerius had not been one of those, and Cunomar’s growth to adulthood had been the first of several surprises that had greeted his return to the Eceni.
    The youth who had faced him in the meetings of the past month, who had returned the night before to the council circle reeking of smoke and victory, was not the child he had so pitied on a beachhead in Gaul.
    The voice that had spoken against him until dawn was no longer strident with the arrogance of youth, but the clear product of Mona’s training, incised with the clarity of rhetoric. More than that, somewhere in the harsh mountains and caves of the Caledonii, the elders of the she-bear had taught Cunomar patience and a quiet, prideful dignity that had given his words a weight beyond his years.
    He stood now beside his mother in front of five thousand warriors, many of them older by a decade, and that same dignity let him bear the disfigurement of his wounds as if they were honour scars; his missing ear flowered in its ugliness at the side of his head and his back was a mess of part-healed wounds that would never knit cleanly and even so, there was not one amongst those watching who did not either wish him as a son or desire him as a lover.
    “… we have languished twenty years under Roman rule, forbidden to train our warriors in the arts of battle. Thus we must find ways to confront them that allow the youths amongst us to learn from the battle-hardened. Above all, wemust not, yet, face the legions in a full pitched battle. To give them such an advantage would be to wreak our own destruction and we…”
    Valerius closed his eyes and gave thanks to both his gods. That had been the hardest part of the night: to sit in the presence of Cunomar and his smoke-filled victory and say over and over, “The Ninth are behind us, Camulodunum in front. We cannot allow them to come at us from two sides and we cannot, we
must
not attempt to take them on in full battle. We are not yet fit. We never will be.”
    Quietly, Cunomar had said, “We are nearly five thousand, the strength of a legion, and growing daily. Soon we will outnumber them.”
    “And we could be ten thousand, or twenty, and we would still lose. We are not the strength of a legion, we are five thousand poorly armed, untrained warriors fighting on tales of past glory. This is what Rome does best. This is what the legions are for; they train for it from the first day of their recruitment until the last day before they retire: to stand in line with their shields locked and their gladii in the fine gaps between and walk through and past and over the bodies of those foolish enough to think they can break a Roman shield wall. Even when they have civil war, their generals do everything they can to avoid setting one legion against another. To attack them with anything less is suicide. While I live, I will not see it happen.”
    Valerius had been tired, still caught in the feeling of the gods’ pool, or he would not have said that last. Cunomar had not challenged him on it, or offered combat to the death, only stared impassively from the far side of the fire, and touched a single finger to his missing ear. Even if Graine had not spokenof it earlier, Valerius would have known him in that moment as an enemy, and would have regretted it as deeply.
    There was no time, then, to remake and mend a relationship gone sour, and no time either, now, before the war host, to question the wisdom of the Boudica as she stretched out her other arm saying, “… such a thing can only be done by my brother, Valerius, who was once Bán, son to Luain mac Calma, Elder of Mona, who sent him back to us to be our aid against Rome.”
    He had no choice but to go to her side, to stand there with his Roman helmet on his arm and his Roman chain mail bright in the sun and let the gathered warriors make what they