Dreaming the Serpent Spear by Manda Scott Page B

gates of the winter fortress around noon. In between was an unbroken snake-line of mounted and unmounted men and the measured tread of their footfalls.
    They marched south along the ancestors’ Stone Way, a paved trading route so old that a hundred generations of wagoners had brought their raw iron and salt and copper and enamel along its length from the southern ports of the great river to this sea port with its access to snowbound lands across the sea, and carted the hounds and leather and Nordic amber and walrus ivory and mutton and bales of wool back south to the great river and thence to Gaul, the Germanies, Iberia, Rome and all the rest of the empire. The legions used the trackway, and had repaired it, but it was old when Rome was young and had been a trading artery when the ancestors still used flint to tip their spears.
    A full wing of five hundred Batavian horsemen trotted on either side of the leading cohort, hooves hammering on the stone like the roll of distant thunder. They were big, broad-shouldered men, armoured in chain mail and bearing cloaks of undyed lambs’ wool with green checks like studded emeralds woven along the hems. They rode into a possible war unhelmeted, with their gold hair tied up at the right temple and their arms bared to the sun, the better to show off the quantity of armbands in enamelled gold and silver that was their pride and their wealth.
    Like their riders, the horses were big and bay and fit, and uniformly harnessed in good oxhide with quantities of silver at the harness mounts. Each mount had its mane pulled newly short and its tail tied up to keep it from providing a handhold for the enemy in any battle. The Batavians were taught from childhood that if they had the ill luck to be unhorsed in battle, they should grab the tail of an enemy horse and swing themselves up by it to unseat the rider and claim the mount for themselves. Twenty years of battle amongst thetribes of Britannia had not convinced them that the warriors against whom they fought would never dream of grabbing the tail of a passing horse.
    Valerius rode at their head with Civilis on one side and Longinus on the other and only the standard-bearers between him and the legate, Petillius Cerialis. His mount was the white-legged almost-black colt with the beautiful neck, whose mane and tail, at his insistence, had been left unpulled and untied.
    Civilis had been blind to the vices of a horse he clearly loved, or was sweetening the truth when he made his gift; the beast was not significantly easier to ride than the Crow-horse, who had sired its sire, only younger, and less predictable. It shied and spooked sideways at patches of sunlight or grasses waving alongside the trackway; it napped at every lift of the wind and every crash of armour from the ranks. It had not bucked Valerius off on mounting, but only because he had been warned that it might do, and had the practice of sitting its grandsire.
    As the morning progressed, a shifting, treacherous mist drank what was left of the light so that, by noon, they rode as though at dusk. Away from known surroundings, the not-black colt became more wilful, not less, sidling three steps sideways for every one forward. Men on either side gave it clear space, grinning. Valerius bit his lower lip and cursed at it roundly in Hibernian.
    At a point when his horse had remained parallel with Longinus’ for more than a stride, the Thracian said, “You’re enjoying that.”
    Valerius arched a brow. “Not as much as you think. If we get back to the steading alive, you can have him. I’ll go back to the Crow-horse.”
    “No thank you. Some of us like to ride without fear for our necks. I’m happy with what I’ve got. It’s better by far than the one I rode in on.”
    Longinus rode a bay gift-horse that was indistinguishable from any other in the Batavian cohorts. His only concern, voiced the evening before, was that it would respond to the Batavian battle calls, which were foreign to