Dreaming the Serpent Spear by Manda Scott

would of the contrast between the Boudica’s son in all the naked glory of his wounding and her once-enemy brother who, almost alone of her council, was whole and unharmed by Rome’s assaults.
    Nobody threw a spear at him; that much was good. A great many turned openly to spit against the wind and more made the sign against evil. He might have stepped back, but that Cygfa came uninvited to his side, and the mood of the host changed again at the sight of her; even more than the Boudica’s son, the Boudica’s elder daughter was known to them all, and what had been done to her.
    She smiled at him with evident warmth, as if he were a trusted friend, which was an entirely new experience. Through it, she said, “Do as I do,” and began to unfasten her belt.
    Caught, he did so, and hid his surprise when, in a gesture as laden with meaning as any that morning, Cygfa swept off her sword and handed it to him, exchanging her weapon for his.
    The crowd approved that, if not rapturously, then at least without the frigid mistrust of before.
    It was enough. They stepped apart and Cunomar was there, this time, to find a graceful way to help his mother dismount.
    Left alone with Cygfa and the eyes of the host elsewhere, Valerius said, “Why did you do that? You have as much reason to loathe me as Cunomar does.”
    She tilted her head. “But I don’t want to lead the war host. And I do want it to be led by someone who understands what it is we face. I love my brother, and respect him as a warrior, but he is not yet fit to lead us to victory against the legions.”
    Valerius said, “Breaca will do that.”
    “Perhaps.”
    Cygfa was daughter to Caradoc, and bore his stamp far more than Cunomar. Her hair was the colour of the noon-sky sun and her eyes the grey of new iron. Nothing was hidden in them. She was in pain and had been and would continue to be; and it was overridden entirely by the strength of her hate.
    She said, “I saw you fight on the beachhead in Gaul,” as if that answered more than it asked.
    Gaul: the land where her father lived in exile; the land from which Valerius had fled, taking Caradoc’s place on the boat.
    He said, “I think Gaul is best forgotten.”
    “Which is why it never will be.” Her gaze was not kind. “You were half drunk and rotten to the core with self-hate. Half the time you were riding a horse you had never seen before and you had a child clinging on to your back and you still fought as if the gods inspired your blade. Breaca fightslike that, when she has the heart for it. My father might have done once, before the emperor’s inquisitors broke him. I have never seen it in anybody else. They say you are a dreamer, given to Nemain, but I think you are a warrior first and that you were born for this. You have lived with the legions and know them as no-one else does, and now you are here, bringing all of that knowledge to us that we may use it against them.”
    “You trust me not to betray you,” he said, in wonder. “There are very few others amongst the war host who do.”
    “I have seen the lengths to which you will go to keep an oath. That, too, was a part of Gaul.”
    Her horse was there, the bay colt he had begun to help her train. She mounted it neatly and swung it round to face him.
    “If we did not need you so very badly, I might hate you, but Rome takes up all of my hating. I will do what I must, support whom I must, to rid my land of that evil. Afterwards, maybe, I can hate you. If I am alive to do the hating. If you are alive to take it.”
    She gave the salute of the warrior so that all watching could see it and spun her horse away from him.
    Valerius watched the place where she had been for a long time before he broke the seal on the messenger’s satchel and read the message from Camulodunum to the legate of the IXth legion.
    Presently, when no-one came to disturb him, he searched for and found the spare vellum and ink that was always kept in a messenger’s pouch, knelt on