Dreaming the Bull by Manda Scott

word gets out of the governor’s threat, the other tribes who might have been unsure of Rome’s enmity will believe the dreamers who tell them we come to destroy them all.”
    This, too, was subversion, but no worse than what had gone before and it did not put Valerius off his counting. He leaned on a many-pronged hazel stump that had been cutlong and left as a tethering post. With one hand, he tapped the rhythm of his heartbeat on the nearest stump. Out on the river, Longinus did the same, although his beat was noticeably faster. The Thracian stood rock-steady on the chalky ice with his feet planted squarely on either side of a crack the width of his fist. He had bet that the ice would hold his weight for the count of fifty heartbeats. In accepting, Valerius had not thought to specify whose heart should define the counting. He still believed he would win.
    Longinus said, “So what you are saying is that the governor has given the dreamers a gift and done nothing to … that’s it … forty-nine … fifty…
Now!
”
    He leaped a spear’s length forward onto the bank. Where his right foot had been, an ice plate no thicker than a man’s thumb tilted sideways into sluggish water. He looked up, grinning his triumph. “The falcon-headed dagger is mine, I believe?”
    The knife was small, of a length to fit in the palm of the hand and not be seen. A small Horus adorned the end of it, subtly carved, with tiny beads of jet as its eyes. It had been a gift from Corvus in their days on the Rhine when the invasion of Britannia had been a fiction, a joke men shared at Caligula’s expense. Once, it had mattered to Valerius that he keep the blade. Now, he reversed it so that the handle faced the Thracian and then spun it high with an added twist so that to catch it unharmed was, in itself, an achievement.
    Smiling, Longinus reached out and snatched the thing from the air. If he knew that Corvus, prefect of the Quinta Gallorum, took the falcon god as his personal emblem, he did not remark upon it. Sitting on the hard-packed snow, he said, “When the governor first made his speech, I had hopesthat the western tribes might never come to hear of it. Since then, however, I have been drinking in the sewer taverns that you recommended. The word in the bottom of the wine cups is that the enemy dreamers can send their spirits as white birds to fly on the wind and that a single word, carelessly spoken, will be carried back to those who guide them. Is it true?”
    The horses moved out in larger circles to graze. One of them disturbed a winter hare that neither men nor horses had known was there until she started up and ran for safety, a white rag, windblown over snow. On the far bank of the river, a dog fox stalked prey too small to be seen. A buzzard flew, mewling, across the god’s arc of unblemished blue. Each, in its own way, journeyed west, towards Mona.
    The fox pounced, delicately lethal. Valerius heard the small squeal of a vole, dying. He lay back in the hard-packed snow and watched the buzzard ride the wind. If he had the knack, and if other gods than Mithras had not forbidden it, he could see how it would be possible to slough off his body and mount the sky to fly as that one flew. If he pressed a thumb to the scar of the god’s brand and felt again the pain and the way it had spun him out of himself into darkness, then it was not so hard to take the separate parts of his soul and let one out, as if on a thread, to rise up into the greying blue of the sky, to feel the buffeting wind press his body and give lift to his wings, to look down on a small herd of horses, feeding in snow, and the two men beside them, one lying vacant-eyed, the other bending over him in anxious solicitude.
    “Valerius?” A hand passed in front of his eyes, breaking the thread too fast and too hard. Longinus’ face loomed tooclose, his breath sour with last night’s wine. “Julius Valerius? Did you hear me? I was asking if their dreamers could listen