Dreaming the Serpent Spear by Manda Scott Page B

say he prays daily for the chance to march his men into battle. He’ll weep tears of raw frankincense when he reads this. He’ll offer his worldly goods to the gods as a mark of his gratitude. He’ll have the Ninth legion at muster and marching down the ancestors’ Stone Way before they have time to kiss goodbye to their lovers. All we have to do is contrive some visible injuries so that I look as if I’ve fought for my life. Could you bring yourself to hit me, do you think?”

CHAPTER 5
    I T WAS RAINING, AND THE MULE WAS STUCK.
    The beast was young and had never been in a pack train before. Broken to harness at the end of autumn, it had spent the winter in the store paddocks at Camulodunum, knee deep in mud and snow, and fed on musty hay, with no exercise to keep it fit.
    The recruits who drove it were every bit as raw and as green and they, too, were on their first campaign. They had no real experience of how to load the packs and the mule was lame on one hind leg and had open sores along its back where a pad had been badly placed.
    To Titus Aelius Ursus, decurion of the second troop, the Fifth Gaulish cavalry wing, assigned to care of the men and their mules for the entirety of their month-long journey west to join the governor’s campaign against Mona, all of these things were regrettable, but inevitable. None of them explained why the beast had planted its feet on the first planks of the bridge and was refusing to move.
    “Hit the bloody thing. What are you waiting for?”
    Ursus shouted it from half a cohort away, urging his horse past the muttering mass of men spreading out along the river bank. They were glad of the rest, and had broken formation, dropping their packs without orders. The indiscipline of it was terrifying; they were young and had been recruited straight from the back streets of Rome, which was a relatively safe place to live, and had trained in the east of Britannia, which was almost as safe, and had no notion of what it was to march through land held by unconquered tribes, where the bones of legionary dead lay thick as pebbles among the heather.
    A battle-served centurion stood on the far side of the river, marshalling the forty men who had already crossed. Tardily, he put his hand to his mouth and called back to the rest of his century: “Get back in formation! I will personally flog any man who steps out of line!”
    Men shuffled and cursed and picked up their packs and were no more ready to meet the enemy than they had been before.
    Ursus was tired and saddle-sore and thick-headed from lack of wine. He had ridden for thirteen days in the wind and pissing rain, with poor food and his bedding rolls damp through the night and not able to drink into warmth and forgetting because his bastard of a prefect had forbidden them to touch the wine supplies from the moment they rode out of the winter quarters. He wanted either to be in battle or out of it; safe in Camulodunum or committed to the western wars, not babysitting a cohort of helpless, hopeless children, half of whom would be dead by the month’s end.
    He reached the bridge and let fly at the nearest of them. “If you don’t get that bloody beast moving, I’ll have you carrying its pack for the rest of the journey west.”
    The pink-faced boy who should have been across the bridge and halfway into the valley beyond raised the rod in his hand and the mule flinched and set its ears back and brayed as it had been doing for far too long, and Ursus finally came close enough to see the welts on its back and haunches where it had been hit often and hard, and so to recognize that hitting it more was not going to make any difference.
    Cursing, he threw himself from his horse. “Leave it. There’s no point.” A junior officer stood close by, old enough at least to be shaving. To him, Ursus said, “Has it done this before?”
    “Never. We’ve never had any trouble. It’s the bridge: it doesn’t like it.”
    Ursus rolled his eyes and sighed,