Dreaming the Serpent Spear by Manda Scott Page A

a patch of clean turf and began to write.
    The messenger lay at the edge of the path, stripped naked now, as the gods had made him. Cunomar and a girl warriorof his she-bear strapped stones to his elbows, knees and belly and lifted him up and swung him sideways. The marsh took his body, sucking it down to a cold and quiet rest.
    Valerius listened for help in the soft sounds of the death-wash and offered the necessary prayers to both his gods, that carried in the wake of the dead, and might be more easily heard.
    A horse shifted restively behind him. A shadow crossed his path. Without turning he said to his sister, “That was well done. They’re different when you’re with them. If I don’t return—”
    “You said there was no risk.” There was a thread of fear in the bluntness of that.
    He stilled the flutterings in his own belly. For Breaca, if for no-one else, he could be confident. “There has to be some risk or your warriors will not believe I have offered my life in their cause. But I don’t intend to die, I swear it; in you, in this war, I have found a reason to live that outweighs everything. The Ninth legion must be brought south by a route that leaves it vulnerable. That won’t happen unless they are led into it by someone they trust.”
    “And if they don’t trust you? If they recognize you and crucify you for twice-treachery? What then?”
    She had asked the same, with the same urgency, in the counsels of the night. The answer was no more easily found now than then. Valerius touched the crook of his thumb to the brand on his sternum that was his first link to the bull-god. He felt no warning there, nor any intimations of death approaching unseen. The gods did not always show such things, but there was a measure of expectation which needed him to act with courage to sway the order of things.
    To Breaca, quite reasonably, he said, “You’ve just finished explaining to the war host how much honour this brings on your family. They’d tie me to a tree and throw spears at me for cowardice if I backed out now. For that alone, I can’t. And I truly do think I am safe. Petillius Cerialis is legate of the Ninth and he has been in Britannia less than a year; he knows nothing of a decurion who once served in the Thracian cavalry. The men he leads have been stationed north of here since the invasion, keeping watch equally on the Eceni and on the northern tribes; they don’t know any more than he does of the politics of Camulodunum and the west. I am nothing to them, just a messenger.”
    He touched the vellum that lay drying on his knee. “The message says what we need it to say. I’ve copied the best flourishes of the original. Listen—”
    Valerius smoothed out the perfect, unblemished kid-skin, best of the emperor’s office, and read,
“From Titus Aquilla, primus pilus of the Twentieth legion, in the governor’s absence acting commander of the colony of Camulodunum, site of the temple to the deified Claudius, site of our unblemished victory over the native Trinovantes
— et cetera et cetera. A man promoted above his abilities and certain of it, clearly —
to Quintus Petillius Cerialis Caesius Rufus, legate, the Ninth legion. Greetings.
    “War is upon us. A watchtower is burning even as I write, the men within it dead and defiled. The emperor’s procurator of taxes is missing and our veterans fear for his life. The Eceni king is dead, and his people remember who they were in the times before we blessed them with peace. We are not in a position to remind them of their folly. Camulodunum is stripped of its defences and its men. I have less than one century of acting legionaries, and three thousand veterans whose courage is beyond reproach but who are no longer young men, fit forsustained battle. If it please you to remember the emperor’s justice, we will offer whatever aid we can.”
    With cautious optimism, Valerius said, “The legate of the Ninth is known across the empire for his impetuosity. Men