Dreaming the Serpent Spear: A Novel of Boudica, the Warrior Queen Paperback - 2006

Excerpt

Listen to me. i am luain mac calma, heron-dreamer, Elder of Mona, guardian of those who wait in exile in Hibernia, and protector of the Boudica, who is our hope for the future. You who gather here will inherit that future, whatever it may be.

We stand now at a crossroads in our history. Once, we were a proud people; we honoured our heroes for their courage in battle, and our dreamers for the wisdom they brought from the gods.
Our tribes were diverse in their customs and histories, we were famed throughout the known world for our work in gold and ­silver and iron; our horses and hunting hounds are sought from the far northern snows to the heat of Alexandria; our land was so fecund that Julius Caesar believed he had come to a place of the gods when he first sailed across from Gaul with intent to conquer over a hundred years ago.

In our diversity was our pride, but we held our gods in common and this was our strength. Each tribe sent the best of its warriors and dreamers annually to train here on the island of Mona, beloved of the gods and all people.

This heritage, and the island itself, is at last under threat. It is nearly twenty years since Rome sent her legions to conquer the tribes of the land they call Britannia, to take our gold and silver, our hounds and our horses, to tax our peoples for the right to farm our own soil and to take our youth into slavery.

Throughout those two decades, while the eastern part of our land has suffered under occupation, the west has resisted savagely and effectively. The high mountains and the fierce courage of the western tribes have kept safe the land they treasure and, most ­especially, have protected this gods’ island of Mona.

For much of those two decades, I believed that whatever other crimes Rome might commit, Mona and all that it means to us was safe. This is no longer true. The new governor of Britannia, Suetonius Paullinus, is gathering two of his four legions off our coast, tasked first to invade, then to slaughter all those who live within the gods’ domain and to erase for ever the dreaming from the earth. Such is Rome’s fear of what we are and what we may be.

Our hope of survival lies now in the woman we know as the Boudica — she who brings victory — in those who care for her and keep her safe, and in the war host that gathers even now in her name. She is Breaca of the Eceni, once Warrior of Mona.

Breaca carries within her the strengths and reality of all that we have been. She is a warrior without match and has fought un­ceasingly these past eighteen years to clear Rome from the land.
While she remained here in the west, with Mona as her home, she was successful. But the east lacked a leader with the strength to raise the warriors from their slavery, and without an eastern ­uprising the war in the west was one of attrition, not of victory.

Three years ago, the Boudica took the decision to leave Mona and to travel east, to the lands of her birth, to the heart of the enemy’s occupied territory. She arrived in Eceni lands with her daughters Cygfa and Graine, and with Cunomar, her only son. There, they found a once-proud tribe living in fear and humility with none willing or able to rise against the legions who ­surrounded them. Still, they set their minds on raising a rebellion and worked towards it.

Over three slow years, they settled into their birthright as the royal line of the Eceni, and with the death of Prasutagos, who had claimed rulership, began at last to raise the war host that might rid the land of Rome.

That might have been the end of it, or, at least, an auspicious beginning. But the emperor Nero, who covets gold above all else, and who had heard of the wealth of the Eceni ‘king’, sent his procurator, one Decianus Catus, to claim all that belonged to the Eceni in the emperor’s name.

Catus was a tax collector, a man of mean mind and meaner spirit, who made himself safe with a cohort of paid veterans: men retired from the legions, who retained with their fighting abilities the legions’ abhorrence of the native tribes.

They arrived in the Eceni steading to find the beginnings of resistance and insurrection. After a mockery of a trial, they found Breaca and her family guilty of treason and began the steps to ­execution. To this end, they flogged the Boudica and her son and then raped the two unmarried girls that they might not be slain while still maidens, this being against Roman law. Thus is justice prosecuted in the emperor’s name.


One man prevented the inevitable progress to execution by ­crucifixion: the Boudica’s brother, who had fought for fifteen years on the side of the legions.

Born Bán, and later called Valerius, this man’s story is known to you all: his betrayal into slavery, his return to Britannia with the auxiliary cavalry, and his eventual betrayal by those close tothe dying emperor Claudius, such that he was named traitor by Nero and became exiled, then, from both sides of this conflict.

Valerius has lived with the essence of despair, but he has also come to understand his birthright both as a warrior and as a dreamer. In his time with Rome, he was given to Mithras, the bull-slayer, hidden god of the legions’ elite. Later, on Hibernia, he came to understand that he was given also to Nemain, god of the moon and water, she who walks most closely with the tribes, who sends the hare and the frog to be her messengers on earth. In the living history of our tribes, no-one has ever walked in the presence of two gods more disparate.

Media reviews

Praise for Dreaming the Hound (book 3):

“Scott has done for the Boudica legend what fellow Briton Mary Stewart did for the Arthur legend 30 years ago: she has created a rich world of magic and mystery grounded in historical fact, peopled with strong, detailed characters, and given them life in almost every sense of the word. . . . Scott has created a vibrant tapestry.”
–The Chronicle-Herald (Halifax)