Dreaming the Eagle

by Manda Scott

  Praise for DREAMING THE EAGLE

  The First in a Four-Part Series

  “A powerful novel, alive with the love, deceit, wisdom and the heroics of humanity.” ∼Jean Auel

  “A massively impressive first volume … It looks as if we will have a new [series] to rival The Lord of the Rings in its appeal.” ∼Scotland on Sunday

  “A staggeringly imaginative invocation of Britain’s secret history. Manda Scott has created a fictional universe all her own, but close enough to our reality for it both to warm and break our hearts. Breathtakingly good, it reveals the best and worst in all of us.”

  ∼Val McDermid

  ALSO BY MANDA SCOTT

  HEN’S TEETH

  NIGHT MARES

  STRONGER THAN DEATH

  NO GOOD DEED

  FOR

  ROBIN AND ELAINE

  WITH LOVE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Any work of this nature requires an extraordinary amount of background material. I would like to thank the following for their expert advice and assistance: Dr. Gilly Carr, Dr. Jon Coe, Philip Crummy, Dr. J. D. Hill, Professor Lawrence Keppie and Owen Thompson, all of whom gave freely of their time and expertise, and those members of the Brit-arch Internet mailing list who so often supplied answers to mundane questions. Most especial thanks to H. J. P. (“Douglas”) Arnold, astronomer and formerly Primus Pilus in the Legio Secunda Augusta re-enactment group, who provided continual support and invaluable comments throughout. As is always the case, any technical faults are entirely mine, as is the interpretation of the facts supplied.

  Thanks also to Jane Judd, my agent, and Selina Walker at Transworld for having faith from the beginning and to Kate Miciak and Nita Taublib at Bantam U. S. for their support and enthusiasm.

  Particular thanks to Leo, who introduced me to the dreaming, and to Carol, Hillary, Eliot and Ken, amongst others, who showed me how to live it.

  CHARACTER LIST

  THE ECENI

  The Eceni: a confederacy of Iron Age tribes inhabiting what is now east Anglia in southeast England. A largely agrarian community, they are famed as horsebreeders and as workers of precious metals. Ferociously anti-Roman.

  Key Individuals: Eceni

  Airmid of Nemain: Dreamer of the Eceni, later of Mona; friend and companion to Breaca

  Bán: Breaca’s half-brother; hare hunter and dreamer of the horse, son to Macha and Eburovic

  Breaca: Eceni warrior, dreamer of the serpent-spear

  Camma: Daughter of Sinochos, sister to Nemma

  Dubornos: Son to Sinochos; a warrior

  Eburovic: Breaca’s father; warrior and smith of the Eceni

  Efnís: Dreamer of the northern Eceni

  Elder grandmother: First in rank of the elders, cared for by Airmid and then Breaca

  Graine: Breaca’s mother; hereditary leader of the Eceni

  Hail: Bán’s hound

  Macha: Graine’s sister; dreamer of the wren, mother to Bán

  Nemma: Daughter of Sinochos, elder sister to Camma

  Sinochos: Eceni hunter

  Silla: Bán’s younger sister by Eburovic out of Macha

  ’Tagos: Eceni warrior

  ELDERS, DREAMERS AND WARRIORS OF MONA (ANGLESEY)

  Mona, known today as Anglesey, is the sacred island where selected dreamers and warriors from all tribes (including Eceni, Caledonii, Cornovii, Brigante, Silures and Votadini) are sent for training under the foremost dreamers in a tradition going back centuries, if not millennia. The dreamers’ training takes up to twelve years, warriors somewhat less. Once trained, the apprentices return to their tribes to bring the teaching to their people.

  Key Individuals: Inhabitants of Mona

  Ardacos: A warrior of the Caledonii

  Braint: A warrior of the northern Brigantes

  Gwyddhien: A warrior of the Silures

  Luain mac Calma: A singer, healer and dreamer of the elder council of Mona, originally from Hibernia (Ireland)

  Maroc: Dreamer and elder of Mona

  Talla: A warrior; the Elder of elders, first in rank

  Venutios: The Warrior of Mona; leader of all Mona’s warriors, chosen by the gods

  TRINOVANTES

  The Trinovante were originally led by Cunobelin, Hound of the Sun, war leader both of this tribe and the Catuvellauni. He is a warrior and diplomat and holds the sworn oath of more warriors than any other leader south of the Brigantes. He controls the rich ports of the Thames and thus controls a large part of the trade with Rome. He keeps a difficult balance, maintaining diplomatic relationships with Rome while not offending the anti-Roman tribes, particularly his northern neighbours, the Eceni. Of Cunobelin’s three sons, only Amminios (cf) is loyal to Rome.

  Key Individuals: Trinovantes

  Amminios: Second son of Cunobelin; born to a Gaulish woman; a friend to Rome

  Caradoc: The third son of Cunobelin; born to Ellin, war leader of the Ordovices; Caradoc is an ally of the Eceni and the only warrior ever to have passed the warrior’s tests of three separate tribes; ferociously anti-Roman

  Cerin: The only true dreamer of the Trinovantes

  Cunobelin: Of the line of Cassivellaunos; known as the Sun Hound; leader of the Trinovantes and the Catuvellauni

  Cunomar: Son to Togodubnos

  Heffydd: Son of Eynd; false dreamer kept by Cunobelin to pass his laws to the people

  Iccius: Originally of the Belgae, now slave to Amminios

  Mandubracios: Legendary traitor, a Trinovantian who betrayed Cassivellaunos to the legions of Julius Caesar during the first Roman invasion

  Odras: Cunomar’s mother, lover to Togodubnos

  Togodubnos: The eldest of Cunobelin’s sons; born to a woman of the royal line of the Trinovantes and hereditary heir to that tribe; a diplomat, his instincts are to tread the same path as his father, that of appeasement of both sides

  Other Key Individuals: Various Tribes

  Arosted: A trader from Dobunni

  Beduoc of the Dobunni: Uncertain ally of the eastern alliance (Eceni, Trinovantes, Catuvellauni) led by Togodubnos and Caradoc in the wake of their father’s death

  Berikos: Leader of the Atrebates, enemy of Cunobelin and ally to Rome

  Cassivellaunos: Past leader of the Catuvellauni, now dead

  Cwmfen: A warrior of the Ordovices, mother of Caradoc’s first child

  Cygfa: Daughter to Caradoc and Cwmfen

  Gunovic: Trader and traveling smith; also a warrior and horse racer; later becomes a member of the Eceni

  FURTHER TRIBES

  The Brigantes: Northern tribe based in the area that is now the north and east of England, either side of the Pennines; led by Cartimandua, ally to Rome

  The Cantiaci: Based in Kent, focus of one wave of the Roman landings

  The Catuvellauni: United with the Trinovantes under Cunobelin’s leadership

  The Dobunni: Southern tribe, south of the Thames, led by Beduoc, uncertain allies of the eastern confederacy

  The Ordovices: The Ordovices occupy the land that is currently north Wales and that led to the sacred isle of Mona. Of all the tribes, they are bound closest to the dreamers. After his mother’s death, Caradoc is accepted as their leader.

  The Silures: Southern neighbours to the Ordovices, once their sworn enemies but united in alliance against Rome

  THE ROMANS

  The events described in Dreaming the Eagle span the reigns of three Roman emperors: Tiberius, Gaius (Caligula) and Claudius. Tiberius had no interest in expansion of the Empire and made no effort towards invasion. Caligula instigated the buildup to the invasion of Britannia but was assassinated before he could complete his task. Claudius oversaw the final act of invasion and the subsequent destruction of the Iron Age tribes.
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  Key Individuals: Gauls and Romans

  Braxus: Overseer to Amminios’ slaves in Gaul

  Civilis: A native Batavian; member of Caesar’s army

  Claudius: Successor to Caligula; emperor from 41–54 AD

  Corvus: A Roman officer rescued by the Eceni in a shipwreck; friend to Bán

  Gaius Caesar (Caligula): Emperor of Rome: 37–41 AD

  Lucius Sulpicius Galba: Governor of Germany

  Milo: Roman slave and Amminios’ stud manager

  Theophilus: Greek physician, originally in Caligula’s train, later to the army on the Rhine

  Tiberius Caesar: Emperor of Rome: 14–37 AD

  PROLOGUE

  AUTUMN A.D. 32

  The attack came in the hour before dawn. The girl woke to the stench of burning thatch and the sound of her mother screaming. Outside, in the clearing beyond the hut, she heard her father’s response, and the clash of iron on bronze. Another man shouted—not her father—and she was up, throwing off the hides, reaching back into the dark behind the sleeping place for her skinning knife or, better, her axe. She found neither. Her mother screamed again, differently. The girl scrabbled frantically, feeling the fire scorch her skin and the sliding ache of fear that was the threat of a sword-cut to the spine. Her fingers closed on a haft of worn wood, running down to the curve of a grip she knew from hours of oil and polish and the awe of youth; her father’s boar spear. She jerked it free, turning and pulling the leather cover from the blade in one move. A wash of predawn light hit her eyes as the door-skin was ripped from its hangings and replaced as rapidly by a shadow. The bulk of a body filled the doorway. Dawn light flickered on a sword-blade. Close by, her father screamed her name. “Breaca!”

  She heard him and stepped out of the dark. The warrior in the doorway grinned, showing few teeth, and lunged forward. His blade caught the sunlight and twisted it, blinding them both. Without thinking, she did as she had practised, in her mind, in the safety of the lower horse paddocks, and once in the forest beyond. She lunged in return, putting the weight of her shoulders, the twist of her back and the straightening kick of both legs into the thrust of the weapon. She aimed for the one pale segment of skin she could see. The spear-blade bit and sank into the notch of his throat at the place where the tunic stopped and the helmet had not yet begun. Blood sluiced brightly downwards. The man choked and stopped. The sword that sought her life came slicing on, carried by the speed of his lunge. She wrenched sideways, too slowly, and felt the sting of it carve between her fingers. She let go of the spear. The man toppled over, angled away from her by the weight of the haft. The doorway brightened and darkened again. Her father was there.

  “Breaca? Gods, Breaca—” He, too, stopped. The man on the floor pushed a hand beneath his side and tried to rise. Her father’s hammer sang down and stopped him, for ever. He brought his arms up and round her, holding her close, smoothing her cheek, running his big, broad smith’s fingers through her hair. “You killed him? My warrior, my best girl. You killed him. Gods, that was good. I could not bear to lose you both—”

  He was rocking her back and forth, as he had when she was a small child. He smelled of blood and stomach acid. She pushed her arms down his front to make sure that he was whole and found that he was. She tried to squirm free, to look at the rest of him. He leaned in closer and his breathing changed and she felt wet warmth slide down her neck to the wing of her shoulder and from there down the flat plane of her chest. She let him hold her then, while he wept, and didn’t ask him why her mother had not come in with him to find her. Her mother, who carried his child.

  The stomach acid was her mother’s. She lay near the doorway and she, too, carried a spear in her hand. She had used it once to good effect but they had been two against her one and the child she carried within had slowed her turn. The slice of the blade had opened her from chest-bone to hips, spilling out all that had been inside. Breaca crouched down beside her. The tentative light of the new day brought colour where before there had been none. She reached down to the small, crinkled thing lying at her mother’s side and turned it over. Her father was behind her. “It would have been a boy,” she said.

  “I know.” He let his hand rest on her shoulder. His fingers were still. His weeping had stopped. He knelt down and hugged her, fiercely. His chin pressed on her head and the burr of his voice rocked through her neck to her chest as he spoke. “What need have I of another son when I have a daughter who can face an armed warrior and live?”

  His voice was warm and there was pride in the wretched grief and she had not the strength to tell him that she had acted out of instinct, not courage or a warrior’s heart.

  Her mother had been leader of the Eceni, firstborn of the royal line, and she was honoured in death as she had been in life. Her body was bound in fine linen and hides, closing the child back into her abdomen. A platform was built of hazel and elm and the body raised onto it, lifting her closer to the gods and out of reach of wolf and bear. The three dead warriors of the Coritani, who had broken the laws of the gods in killing a woman in childbirth, and of the elders in killing the leader of a neighbouring tribe without fair battle, were stripped and dragged to the forest to feed whatever found them first. Breaca was given the sword from the one she had killed. She didn’t want it. She gave it to her father, who broke it across his forging block and said he would make her a better one, full sized, for when she was grown. In its stead, Airmid, one of the older girls, gave her a crow’s feather with the quill dyed red and bound round with blue horsehair, the mark of a kill. Her father showed her how to braid her hair at the sides, as the warriors do for battle, with the feather hanging free at her temple.

  In the late morning, Eburovic, warrior and smith of the Eceni, took his daughter to the river to wash her clean of the blood of battle and bind the cut on her hand and then walked her back to the roundhouse to the care of Macha, her mother’s sister, the mother of Bán, his first and only living son.

  I

  SPRING-AUTUMN A.D. 33

  CHAPTER 1

  Bán had the dream for the first time when he was eight years old, in the spring after Breaca lost her mother and got a sword-cut on her hand. He woke suddenly and lay sweating under the hides, his eyes searching the dark of the roof space for comfort. A long time ago, when he was younger and afraid of the night, his father had carved the marks of horse, bear and wren on the crooked beam above his bed to keep him safe. He had spent light summer evenings tracing them in his mind, feeling the wall of their protection. Now he lay in the pressing silence, praying for light, and saw nothing. If the moon had risen, it did not shine on his side of the roundhouse. If there were stars, their light did not penetrate the thatch. Inside, the cooling embers of the fire gave off a thread of smoke but no flame. It was the blackest night he could ever remember and he might as well have been blind, or still dreaming.

  He did not want to be dreaming. Blinking, he searched for other ways to anchor himself in the world of the living. Light, dry smoke tickled his nose. Each night his mother laid a tent of twigs on the embers, that the smoke of their burning might carry her family safely through the world beyond sleep. With age, he was beginning to understand the language of the smoke. He breathed in and let the different tones filter through his head, sorting them into an order that would speak to him: the acerbic touch of sun-scorched grass, the warmer, more sinuous thread of acorns roasting, the pricking of wet shale and the high, clear note of tannin, as from a hide, freshly cured. It was this last one that fixed it. An image came of a girl lying asleep under a scattering of white petals and, later, of a tree dripping red with berries the colour of dried blood that he had been told not to eat. Hawthorn. It would have been that.

  He made his body relax. He was calmer now. His heart beat less hard. He closed his eyes and let the drifting smoke carry him back to the start of the dream. In the other world it was daytime. He was riding a strange horse, not one of his father’s; a red mare with a hide the colour of a fox in winte
r. She was tall and very fit. He ran his hand down the length of her neck and her coat sparked like a new coin beneath his fingers. They were running fast, at dream-speed. He was naked and the mare had no saddlecloth. He could feel the bunch of her muscles gather and pull beneath his thighs. If he worked to let go of this world, he could see the steam billow back from her nostrils and hear the whistle of her breath over the splashing hammer of hooves on turf and bog. In a while, she passed out of the sunlight and entered a mist so thick he could barely see the tips of her ears. The fog swirled in banners past his eyes, making him blind. He sucked in a breath and smelled horse-sweat and stale bog-water and the mint-sour tang of myrtle crushed underfoot. Without any good reason, he lifted one hand and cupped it round his mouth and yelled a word—a name—into the dizzying white. His voice came out harshly, like a raven’s, and the name itself made no shape in his head. It echoed and came back to him and still made no sense. He let it go and leaned forward instead, singing to the red mare, urging her on, promising her fame and long life and strong foals if she carried them both safely through the danger. There was certainly danger, both of them felt it; a distant malevolence kept at bay only by their speed. The mare flicked her ears back to listen and then cocked them suddenly forward. The boy felt a change in her stride and looked up. Ahead of him, a fallen yew blocked the path. The mare gathered herself and tucked her head in, shortening her stride. He wrapped the fingers of both hands tight in the snaking red of her mane, feeling the coarse cut of the hair on his palms, She jumped cleanly and he soared with her into eternity. The ground was firm on the far side. The mare stretched her forelegs to land. The boy relaxed his grip on the mane and sat upright and this time, the first time, he lost himself in the fierce joy of it, exulting in the stories he would tell Breaca and their father and later, when he had it right, his mother.