Free Dreaming the Bull by Manda Scott Page B

obeying orders, but the dictates of his body. The rising hairs on his neck and the sweeping heat and cold in his belly and the clash of weapons and the far-off cries of the wounded were both a memory and a premonition. He did not know the ways in which his face changed as he spoke but he felt the stir in the air and when he finally removed his gaze from the blank wall on which battles had been fought and lost, he found that it drifted, without his will, to Corvus’ face. The concern he read there surprised him. Still, it was Marcus Ostorius, the governor’s son, whospoke. His voice was quiet, as it might be were he speaking in the presence of one who slept and must not be wakened.
    “Why must we crush them so completely, Valerius?”
    “Because in taking their land, you are taking their livelihood. They can live without weapons, they know that even if their pride won’t let them admit it, but they can’t live without the means to eat. If the Twentieth departs and the Trinovantes are still in possession of their weapons when the veterans begin to take their fields, their cattle, their grain, then you will have no colony by the end of winter and the war here in the east will make the one happening now in the west look like a petty skirmish. If the veterans are to have any hope of survival, you must confiscate all of the natives’ weapons, punishing everyone who resists, or you must kill them all down to the last child at the breast. Those are your only choices.”

CHAPTER 6
    “It is in my mind that a people faced with death or slavery as their only choices are not readily going to relinquish war.”
    Longinus said it, five days later, standing on the rotting ice of the river. The Thracian’s horses, who were, indeed, his brothers, but no more than that, had drunk from holes chipped at the water’s edge and were pawing holes in the snow to graze. The mounts of Valerius’ troop mingled with them as they had done since the afternoon of their first meeting.
    With their charges safe, the two horsemasters had sought a wager that was hard enough to make a satisfying win while still being within the bounds of possibility and, at a stretch, of personal safety. The treacherous, melting ice had provided the answer. Each man was halfway to winning, or losing, when Longinus brought up the topic of the governor’s speech.
    It was a diversionary tactic, designed to throw Valerius off his count, and the Thracian took care to check the length of the river in both directions before he spoke. Longinus might have been rash, even ridiculously prone to personal risk, but he was not stupid.
    The governor had not ordered decimation, but three men had been flogged for sedition and none had questioned the wisdom of Scapula’s tactics in the west as explicitly as Longinus. Still, the mutterings continued. The disarming of the eastern tribes had been accepted readily by the ranks; they were safer if the barbarians around the fortress were stripped of their weapons. The governor’s inaugural speech, given in the freezing hall of the
praetoria,
had made them far more restless. Scapula was not a man to take his orders lightly. He had been instructed to make the west safe and he had determined that the best way to do so was to extinguish the entire tribe of the Silures. Nothing of such severity had been practised in the province since the invasion, or even threatened. It was all too easy to imagine the response of the western warriors when faced with the reality of a governor who had sworn to kill every man, woman and child of their tribe.
    Longinus rocked on the ice and spread his arms for balance. “You know them,” he said. “Will the Silures let us kill their men and enslave their women and children as he has promised?”
    Valerius said, “If they do, it will be the first time in the history of their people. Only the Ordovices are more savage and if they are united with the Silures, nothing we can do will stop them. And then as soon as