by Manda Scott
The sun was warm on his right shoulder as they reached the ruins of the birthing hut he had made. The roofing had been taken down within days of the attack and the winter had seen to the rest. He followed his daughter as they rode past it in single file and then left the trackway, cutting right, towards the small wood that reached up the slope on the eastern side. When they reached it, they turned right again, to follow its margins.
Graine’s bones lay on the platform south of the wood. She had died with a spear in her hand and the little owl had been her soul’s guardian. Eburovic could imagine nothing better as a death gift than the brooch his daughter had made for her. He forced himself to think of it, imagining the shape of the mould, the carved imprint of the lines and the way it had looked when she broke the mould open; anything that meant he did not have to think about where he was going. Breaca rode on ahead of him, straight-backed, with her hair lying like a fiery cloak around her shoulders, and it was impossible to know what she was thinking.
They reached the place midway through the morning. The sun shone from behind, throwing short shadows that pooled at the horses’ feet. An easterly wind blew lightly, lifting tatters of blue wool on the platform. On their arrival, a magpie and two jackdaws lifted themselves lazily and moved to a nearby branch. They made no noise. Without speaking—he could not, at that moment, have spoken—Eburovic dismounted and led his horse forward. Breaca pushed the grey to the base of a post. She was not tall enough to see on top of it. He was about to offer a hand when she reached up to the cross-piece and, with an ease that spoke of many repetitions, hoisted herself up, keeping her balance with the tip of one foot on the filly’s rump. Like that, she could stretch forward and lay her brooch where she wanted. He saw her lips move but did not hear the words. He turned the roan and walked it away, feeling his gaze an intrusion. She jumped down and rode across to him shortly afterwards. He searched her face and her eyes, looking for signs that the dream had broken, that she had drawn it out as the grandmother had said she should. She smiled then and nodded and he let her be. They rode back again in silence. The wind moved round to the south and the air became heavy. In the distance, thin, grey clouds promised rain.
As they reached the fields and turned the horses out, Eburovic found his voice again.
“Are you busy?” he asked. The spring planting had started. Her days were spent in the fields. If she was not sowing seeds, she was weeding, or clearing the stones. She had washed carefully before coming or there would have been earth packed under her fingernails from the previous day. Out across the paddocks, he could see the others already at work.
Breaca had not been thinking of work. She stared at him blankly for a moment, frowning, then said, “Airmid and Macha have started planting the woad. They will need help to finish before the rain comes. I should be there now.”
“Come to the forge when you’re finished. I will have something to show you.”
She came to him near dusk, with the hens taking the last of the evening light in the doorway. It had rained during the afternoon but the slates of the roof overhung the entrance and the scraped dust bowl was dry. A small, pale hen with a single dark spot on each feather spread her wings in the centre, fluffing her plumage and tilting her head back to catch the heat from inside. It was exceedingly hot. The fires had run all day, using up the greater part of the charcoal. Eburovic had stripped to the waist, abandoning his apron. He worked with his back to the door, hammering. Breaca sat beside the hen, watching the run of iron on iron, feeling the rhythm of it rock through her body, not quite matching the pulse of her heart. She was tired. Her injured hand ached from planting and weeding. She massaged the palm with the thumb of her other hand, letting the roll of the hammer sweep through her, carrying away the irritations of the day. She was more irritable than she had any reason to be and it worried her; she had snapped at the elder grandmother, which was pointless and only brought trouble, and had argued later with Airmid, who was her friend and did not deserve it. Even the ride to the platform had been disappointing, although she had made an effort to conceal that. She let her mind thread back over the moments, trying to find where the day had gone wrong.
“Breaca?” The hammering had stopped without her noticing. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.” She smiled for him. It was not a lie. All she needed was a night’s sleep and she believed that to be possible now. “I’m late,” she said. “I’m sorry. Nemma is nearing childbirth and Airmid wanted to find some valerian root for afterwards. We looked for longer than we should have done.”
“But you found it?”
“Of course.” Her smile was real this time. “Would I be here otherwise? Airmid is not one to give up on something when she has set her mind to it.” Which had been, stupidly, the source of the argument. She stood, taking care not to fluster the hen. “Am I too late for you?”
“No. Come in. I was just finishing.”
The forge was much as it had been at dawn; the fire glowed orange, throwing odd, shifting shadows across the walls. The smell was of burned metal and burning charcoal and the man-sweat of her father. On impulse, she kissed his arm, tasting salt and scorched hair. He hugged her and, looking past his shoulder, she found why the fires had burned so hot for so long: Eburovic had spent the day welding. An unfinished sword lay on the bench, the blade as long as her arm and as wide as her hand, with one end narrowed to a prong that would one day take the hilt. She picked it up. The hilt end fitted well to her hand and the weight of the blade was not too great. The metal still held the bloom from the fire and the blued mackerel stripes of the woven welds that bound the nine narrow strips of raw iron into one broader blade. She swung it once, experimentally, and felt the thin thrill of almost-fear that sang through her whenever she handled her father’s finished weapons. Reverentially, she laid it back on the bench.
“Well?”
“It’s good,” she said. She had learned from him to be careful with her praise.
“Would you test it against a real blade?”
“Can I?”
“Yes. Take it.”
She did so. The feeling was more than it had been. A hollow place in the palm of her hand opened to receive it. Holding it, her joints swung more freely, as they did after riding, or practising with the spear. She swung a few times, feeling the weight of it, and then, looking up, saw that Eburovic had squared up in front of her, holding his own sword, the great blade with the feeding she-bear on the pommel that held the lives and deeds of her ancestors in her father’s line. He said, “Make the back cut to the head.”
The blade wanted to move. Using both hands, she swung backhanded, aiming for his temple. Iron clashed on iron. A single spark flew to the doorway.
“Good. Now on the forehand to my knee.”
The air thrummed past her arms. The solid, unformed edge of her blade sang down the full length of his, riding over the notch that the white-headed champion of the Coritani had made when he fought her great-grandfather in single combat to settle the dispute of a boundary line. A storm of sparks flew high in the darkness. She let the tip of her blade bounce off the packed earth of the floor.
“And a thrust to the chest…”
She was more careful with this one, knowing he would catch the weight of it on the hilt. Her blade rode on his and stopped, suddenly. The shock of the impact rolled through her shoulder. The oval of red enamel on the left side of her father’s cross-piece chimed out of tune with the rest but did not crack as it had done in the hands of her grandfather’s grandfather as he fought Caesar’s legions by the river.
“Good. Very good.” He was smiling, quietly, as he did when he had a surprise for her. Taking up a chalk stone, he measured the blade against the length of her arm.
“You are young. You have two hands’ more growing in you yet but it is still too long for what you will be. We will cut it, here”—he made a mark with the chalk—“at the lower third. If you want, we can use the extra iron to make the cross-piece and the pommel. Or,
if you prefer it, they can be cast in bronze. If you were the one making the sword, which would you choose?”
Her eyes sprang wide. “Am I to make it?”
That would have made the day perfect. For years, she had imagined the blade she would make when he deemed her old enough to work iron.
His gift was better yet. He said, “You can help to make it if you want, but I think your own blade should be made by someone else. It is stronger like that.”
Her head spun. This was more than perfect. Tentatively, she touched the unmade blade and felt the thrill of it. Her father said, “When your mother died, I promised to make you a sword. This is the one. It sings to you and you to it. And so, knowing that, would you have me make the hilt of bronze or of iron?”
Too much, too soon. She sat down with her back to the furnace and tried to let go of the song in her head. She needed to think as a smith. The quality and weight of the blade made for the length of the stroke and the power it needed to bite into flesh, but a good craftsman put the soul of the sword in the patterns on the cross-piece, the feel of the grip and the shape set on the pommel, and it was the choice of materials that made each of these unique. Iron was harder but colder. Bronze might dent but was easier to work and could carry more detail. Her father’s sword hung on the wall behind him. The patterns on the hilt of the she-bear blade were ancient and complex; it would not be possible to draw the same subtlety from iron. Looking at it, Breaca found that she wanted her own blade to be as close to her father’s as possible.
“The hilt and the pommel should be of bronze,” she said, formally. “But we should not make them until I have had my dreaming and know what shape they need to be.”
“Then it will be so. We will make the blade first and wait for your dream. Come when you can and we will make it together. I have an idea of something new we might try.”
CHAPTER 3
They worked on the new blade intermittently through the remainder of the spring, snatching shared time. Foaling ended and the late planting began. Breaca spent her mornings and evenings attending to the needs of the elder grandmother and the greater part of each day in the company of every other able-bodied adult and grown child, sowing beans and peas and barley and weeding between the rising rows of winter wheat and carrying water to the high fields when the new seeds began to sprout. In the times between, there were mares to be checked for mastitis and foals to be handled and the first few steps to be taken in gentling last year’s foals that had spent the winter coming to hand for their feed but had not yet known a bridle.
The sense of her mother changed. On the platform beyond the fields at the edge of the forest, the bones of the dead bleached under the sun and grew grey under the rain. For a while, as the hawthorns shed their flowers, they lay under a fall of petalled snow and took on the colour around them. She visited still, but less often, and Breaca’s nights were calmer. If her mother came at all, she brought peace and good memories, not pain.
The world moved fast around them. In a birthing hut built inside the rampart, Nemma gave birth to a red-haired baby boy. Of those several youths who could have been the sire, Verulos pledged its rearing. He was lame in one foot and had failed his warrior’s tests but he was a good apprentice harness-maker and it was widely agreed that he would be a suitable father. Nemma was clearly content with the outcome.
In the forge, the sword grew slowly from the dense, dark shaft to the blue iron of a forged blade. The metal worked well under the hammer. Eburovic sang over it as he had not sung all winter. Once, he asked Breaca for hair plucked from the sides of her head where it would be braided for battle, and another time for her nail parings. She gave him what he asked for and watched him build them into the start of the day’s fires, still singing. He did other things as well, things that she had not seen before, and the forge became a place of new explorations that drew her back daily and sang her to sleep at night.
Elsewhere, Bán nursed his hound whelp. The small thing had become less small and found his legs. His eyes, which had been pale blue like the sky when they opened, had gone grey like her father’s and then brown like Macha’s and Bán’s. With longer legs and better vision, he progressed from chasing snails and slugs and beetles to herding the chickens and bothering the mares. Taller still, he learned that the roasting fires were worth watching and Camma, younger sister to Nemma, who tended them, found herself daily engaged in a challenge where the winner gained at least a portion of a meal and the loser might go hungry. She did not always win.
The traders came with the change in the weather. Arosted was first; the slight, wiry salt trader who came up the tracks on the last of the snow, leading his train of splayfooted pack ponies with his son and his daughter and two of his half-cousins as helpers, haulers and guardians. He laid out his bricks of salt, still crisp and dry from the kilns, in one of the barns and the bargaining began. In previous years, he had traded for weapons. This year, because the people of the Dobunni, in whose land the salt springs rose, had made peace with their southern neighbours, he took instead brooches and belt buckles from Eburovic, two sapling hounds bred by Macha from a promising young bitch, and a pair of doeskins which had been hunted by Sinochos and prepared by Nemma, whose dream was the red doe and who could turn out their skins softer than anyone.
Besides salt, Arosted brought the first news of the outside world in the wake of winter, a service for which he was also well paid. As the flurry of trading subsided, he took Eburovic and Macha aside, conveying the news that the elders of the Coritani wished it to be known that they had cast out three of their younger warriors at the start of winter in retribution for a raid that went against the laws of gods and men. Most important, they wished it to be understood that they would never, in any circumstances, have sanctioned an attack on a woman in childbirth, particularly not a woman as honoured by the gods as was the late leader of the Eceni.
When Macha suggested politely that it was not unknown for the elders of the Coritani to lie, Arosted showed them the armband in solid gold that he had been given to ensure the message was passed speedily to the right ears. If they lied, they did not do so cheaply. Eburovic, in turn, gave him a bay horse recently broken for riding and a dagger made of hard iron with copper wire bound round the hilt. It was deemed a fair trade.
The salt trader left with the old moon. The new brought others, most notably Gunovic, horse-racer, warrior and travelling smith—and the only weapons-maker in living memory to match Eburovic in skill. He rode up from the south, bringing rods of raw iron fresh from his ovens and newly cast cakes of copper and tin from the mines and furnaces in the south and ingots of silver from the far north and red Hibernian gold. He was a big, bulky man with dark hair and skin that had weathered to brown even at the start of spring. His tunic was black, set about with brooches in gold, silver and bronze that showed off to good advantage against the dark material, and the sleeves had been cut out, the better to display the fortune he wore in bands on his bare arms. He rode through the gates on a hazy afternoon in a jingle and clash of precious metals and the trading had begun before he reached the first of the horse barns. At the roundhouse, he was given oatcakes and ale while others unpacked his baggage train for him. He sat in the doorway with Macha and the elder grandmother, exchanging news from those parts of the south not yet visited by Arosted, while his work was passed from hand to hand to get the feel of it.
In the beginning he offered the easy, decorative things: brooches, combs, dress pins, neck-pieces and armbands, all in gold and silver, copper and bronze, with or without enamel insets. This year, for the first time, there was blue enamel set alongside the red on some of the pieces; Belgic work, from the apprentice workshops on the continent. The blue was very close to the colour of the Eceni cloaks and those pieces went first, followed closely by others inset with coral or amber, or finely worked in silver and gold. Long before evening, he had traded all the pieces he intended to sell and gone on to bargain with Eburovic in the forge, exchanging, amongst other t
hings, several cakes of raw blue enamel for a mirror in silver and a brooch cleverly made to look like a spear-head from the front but with a feeding she-bear arced across the back of it.
The place of honour in the roundhouse that evening was his. Sinochos had hunted and they feasted on jugged hare and field beans spiced with wild garlic. They asked him for a song after. Gunovic was not a singer, he had no training, but he had a good stock of stories that were common amongst the tribes and a voice to do them justice. He drank the ale and bade them stoke up the fire and, in honour of Eburovic, began with a tale for the children, of the she-bear who lived in a cave in a mountain and first brought fire to the ancestors, together with the skills to forge metal. It was a good tale, although here in the flat lands of the east, where a hill barely made a thumbprint on the horizon, he spent time building for the young ones a picture of the jagged, snow-laden mountains in which the bear lived and the great cascading waterfall, the height of nine times nine men, that tumbled down for ever in crashing torrents to fill the gods’ pool below. They watched him in utter silence. Bán hugged Hail at each mention of the beast, never taking his gaze from the weaving, sensuous hands of the smith and the stream of shadow pictures they cast on the wall.
