by Manda Scott
Everyone dreams. From before she could walk, from before she could speak more than her own and her mother’s name, Breaca had listened to others talk of their dreams and their dreaming. It had come to her early that while her mother had dreams—colourful, vivid, lively dreams with great bearing on her life and her family—Macha and the elder grandmother spent time alone dreaming and came back to the roundhouse with their eyes fixed on faraway places and the words of the gods on their lips. At much the same time, it had come to Breaca that she wanted the dreaming far more than the dreams—and that it was granted far less often.
Three times since she had been old enough to understand the nature of what was happening, girls had gone out to spend their three nights alone and come back to tell of it. The sisters Camma and Nemma had gone out in succeeding years and come back with the white goose and the deer respectively as their dreams. Camma, who passed her days keeping Hail from her roasting pans, had been a vague, pale-haired lass who lived with her eyes on another horizon, but motherhood had taught her the truth of her dream and she guarded her two children with a ferocity that proved worthy of it. Nemma, her sister, had returned with the red doe, but it would have been astonishing had it been otherwise. From early childhood she had followed the tracks of the red deer, collecting dropped antlers and moulding deer-shapes out of scraps of hunted skin. Throughout one summer, she had reared an orphaned hind calf, feeding it on mare’s milk and teaching it to come to her call, so that now, in hard winters, she fed it as she fed the horses. Sinochos and the other hunters knew its tracks and knew that they touched it at their peril.
Those were the first two Breaca saw. Neither was exceptional; each was happy with her dream and each paid due respects to the goose or the deer at the appointed days and times and hung a token—a feather and a hind foot respectively—on the wall above her sleeping place to act as guardian. It was Airmid, strange, tall, dark-skinned, dark-haired Airmid, who was different. She was the one who, at dusk on the last day of her long-nights, had walked back in through the door to the women’s place, stepping across the stones laid in the entrance as if walking on water, with her eyes not in focus and her face wide with wonder and her mouth still not able to make the words for what she had seen. She had not been given a token; she had no need of something external to remind her of what had happened. The gods had spoken. They would continue to do so, and what they had said defined the rest of her life. She was a dreamer.
Breaca had witnessed the full import of it in the spring before her mother died. It was a sharp, clear morning with a good sun and a thick frost. She had risen early, out of habit, and was sitting outside the roundhouse, working on a deerskin. Bán had been with her, plucking a woodcock he had caught in a trap. Everyone else was still asleep when Airmid arrived, running from the women’s place, skipping barefoot past the midden without care for the debris, stopping only at the door to the roundhouse because the elder grandmother had spoken to her sharply from inside, saying her name and asking for caution. She had waited then, panting, clenching and unclenching her fingers, with her dark hair, so much like Macha’s, still crushed flat from sleeping and her eyes wild and the chaos of the dream hanging about her, making her other, in ways she had not seemed before. The grandmother had finished dressing then and come out to listen and, with a visible effort, Airmid had come back from the place her mind had gone. “The rain is coming,” she said, and her voice had rasped, like a frog’s. “Nine days from now. We need to move everything.”
“The rain always comes. Why should we move anything now?” The elder grandmother had been gentle, which was a new experience. In normal circumstances, one roused her early at great peril.
“There’s too much. It will flood. The gods’ pool beneath the waterfall will not hold all the water and it will spread out across the paddocks like a sea. The river will carry the bodies past the doorway of the roundhouse. The bodies—”
She had stopped then, biting her lips to keep from weeping; Airmid, who wept for nothing and no-one. Breaca had reached for her, but the elder grandmother had risen first and taken the older girl inside to lie down on her own bed and given her a wad of willow to chew until she slept, and Breaca had been set to watch over her while the old woman went off to discuss the news with her peers.
There had followed a scatter of unseasonal activity. Over the next seven days, the people had moved to the higher pastures and carried with them everything that would spoil. On the ninth day, the rains had come as Airmid had said they would. Over the course of the day, the river had swollen and burst its banks and the flood had risen halfway up the wall of the roundhouse and everyone who saw it had given thanks for the timeliness of the warning that had allowed them to move; all except for Airmid herself, who had wept inconsolably through fingers splayed wide with grief because the three frogs that had come to warn her in the dream had floated past, dead, on the water.
Breaca had watched her more closely after that, if from a distance. Airmid had a difficult reputation and it was not entirely undeserved. Four years spent as the eyes and limbs of the elder grandmother had left their mark so that she did not speak much and when she did so, it was with an irony that frequently bordered on rudeness. If pushed, the edge of her tongue was sharper than anyone but the elder grandmother’s and that was not something to court without reason.
Other gossip was less accurate. The tale of Dubornos, the redheaded son of Sinochos, and the damage she had done him was plainly untrue although Airmid had made no effort to refute it, which was frustrating. In the early days, when Breaca had realized that it was jealousy that made her peers speak so badly of the older girl, she had tried to defend her. She had fought, twice, and been blooded. Later, after a conversation with her mother, she had stopped fighting another’s battles and set herself instead to watch and learn what she could of the secrets of dreaming. If Airmid noticed, she gave no sign.
Everything had changed in the autumn with the death of Breaca’s mother. Airmid had been a quiet, solid presence at a time when the world had turned over and she had made the gift of the red-quilled warrior’s feather, which no-one else had thought to do. Afterwards, a new respect had grown between them, and then friendship, which went deeper and was worth more.
It was a good day to sit quietly with a friend. Breaca watched the changing flood of light on the surface of the pool. The sun moved and her shadow moved with it, sliding forward by degrees until it stretched to the first reeds that hedged the bank. She considered whether she needed to change her position so that her shadow might not taint the water and decided not. The sun moved further until it shone on her back, warming the place between her shoulder blades that had felt exposed since the morning of her mother’s death. She closed her eyes and let the heat move inwards. In her mind, her mother spoke to her, as she had done in her infanthood and, like an infant, she did not understand the words. In the distance, a frog began to speak and the two voices merged. A hand took over from the sun, kneading the muscles that ran up either side of her spine. A voice that was not her mother’s said quietly, “Breaca, open your eyes.”
She did so. A small frog, less than three fingers wide, sat on a rock in the dark of her shadow. His skin was moss-green with a brown stripe along the side. His eyes were entirely black, and when he blinked the upper and lower lids met in the middle of the brown stripe. He blinked now. Breaca blinked back.
Airmid said, “How did you know that I needed the plantain?”
“I heard you tell Macha.”
“Where did you find it?”
“There’s a plant in the high paddock, where the yearling colts grazed in spring. I picked the leaves at the old moon and took care to take only one in three. The plant is still living.”
“Thank you. That was well done.” Next to her frogs, Airmid cared most about the plants. It was one of the things that set her apart from the others. The hands moved from Breaca’s spine to her shoulders, working out the knots of a morning’s work. “You have been practising wit
h your father’s new war spears again?”
“Only for a short while. Macha needed help with the weeding. Afterwards, I took one out to the lower meadow and tried it for balance.”
“Was it good?”
“It will be good for Sinochos. He holds them further back. I would need a weight at the butt end to keep the tip up.”
“Hmm. Move your arm…no, back, like that, to make this muscle bigger…does that hurt?”
“A little.” Breaca closed her eyes, seeking the spot on the top of her shoulder where the pain began.
“I thought so. Here, do you feel that? You’ve torn it. You should talk to your father. Ask him to make a spear balanced for you. Is that better?”
“Yes, thank you. He won’t make one. I’m too young. If it comes to war, I won’t be allowed to fight.”
“It won’t come to war this summer. The elders will meet at the midsummer gathering to review their decision but it is well known how you feel and if you speak against it nobody will gainsay you. If the Coritani were to attack, they might change their minds, but Gunovic has done his work well; the Brigantes are threatening them from the north and the warriors of the red kite are not so many that they can defend two borders at one time. They will not attack us if we do not attack them, so there will be peace for now. It may be different by next summer, but you will have your own blade by then as well as a spear.”
“I might still be a child, and not allowed to fight.”
“No. You will be a woman before the winter.”
“How do you know?”
“I can read it in the water.”
It was a joke. Airmid’s voice changed, deepening so that it thrummed through them both. Breaca opened her eyes and looked downwards. In the pool, their merged reflections shimmered. She watched as Airmid’s hands moved forward, sliding under her arms to lift the curve of her breasts. She frowned. A cold ache began inside her. “Is it so sure?”
“I think so. You can’t stay a child for ever.” The fingers worked gently, making her stomach swoon. “Does that hurt?”
“No…Yes. A little. Only if you squeeze hard.”
“But they feel sore more than they used to?”
“Yes.”
“Then it will be two months. Three at the most. You will come to your bleeding by the end of harvest, if not sooner.”
They were not joking now, not for this. It was too big to think of. Airmid’s hands linked in front of her, squeezing her diaphragm, warming the place where the fear grew. Breaca looked up at the sky. High overhead a kestrel hung on a thermal, a blurred smudge in blue air. Beside her, Airmid said, “Be happy. By this time next year, you will be free of the elder grandmother.”
“Did you think that when you went out on your long-nights?”
“No. I was happy with her. I was sad to leave.”
“I will be too.”
“I know.”
The sun moved round and glanced up off the water, achingly bright. They slid off the rock and into the shade of the hazel and lay side by side, their arms stretched out together, dark skin and pale making alternating bands of colour. Breaca turned onto her stomach and drew patterns on Airmid’s arm, starting at the wrist and moving up the forearm. At the elbow, she stopped and traced the lines of an old tattoo. The pattern was fading a little with age but it had been carefully done, slightly larger than life, as if the god, in the shape of a frog, had dipped a hind foot in blue-green ink and stepped on the inner fold of Airmid’s elbow where the mark of it would be closest to her heart. Breaca drew a loop around it with her finger. With care, because it was not done even for the closest of friends to probe too deeply into another’s dreaming, she said: “I have always wondered how the elder grandmother could do this without sight to guide her hand.”
“She doesn’t need eyes to see the patterns of things. You know that.”
“I do. But I thought she might have done it before, when you were a child and she could still see.”
“No. I didn’t know about the frogs then. They didn’t come to me before my long-nights. Nothing came before then. I thought I was barren, that I would be coming back with nothing. I used to lie awake praying to Nemain for a dream, any dream, even if it was one that barely touched me, like Camma’s. The elder grandmother told me once that she thought I might dream the earthworm and I believed her. I couldn’t sleep for nights afterwards, thinking how bad it would be.”
“She told me I was a wasp, that I would sleep through the winter and sting people in the summer.”
“She has her own reasons. I think the worrying is needed, to leave you open for the gods. But you will dream. You must believe it. It’s just hard to wait.”
“I know. I have no patience. But it’s better when we talk about it.”
It had been her utmost fear: that she was so close to becoming a woman and still the gods had sent no sign. It was good to hear that it had been the same for Airmid. The knot in her diaphragm relaxed a little. She sighed and shifted over on the rock, moving her hand on the other girl’s hip. A soft kiss brushed her neck. She leaned into it and let her fingers drift down, exploring. It was a day for new patterns, for exploring in the shifting shadows, for merging, sweat-glued, with another. The kisses became longer and more focused and their direction changed. At the pool, the kingfisher dived a second time, unwitnessed, and came up with a fish. High above, the kestrel slipped sideways over the water and began to hunt the rushes on the far bank. Across the river, in the horse paddocks, a boy and a hound whelp played with a leggy dun filly, taking turns to stalk imaginary monsters.
The sun moved on and the shadows made sharper angles. Breaca lay with a palm pressed to Airmid’s frog-print and thought of childhood and what it would be to leave it. A new thought came, one that brought back the cold, differently. She rolled over, moving out of the shade. It did not make the thought better. “Airmid…?”
“Yes?”
“What if I don’t become a dreamer, and you are called to go to the dreamers’ school on Mona? Would you go without me?”
“What?”
The older girl came upright, suddenly, frowning to make sense of the question. Looking her straight in the eye, Breaca said, “The training is twelve years, maybe twenty, if the elders ask it. Would you go without me?”
“No, of course not, how could you say that?” The frown was frozen on Airmid’s face. Her fingers, lacing through Breaca’s, squeezed until the knuckles were white. “It is not going to happen,” she said. “Don’t talk of it. You will dream.”
“But—”
“But even if I were called to Mona tomorrow, you could still come. Every dreamer must have a warrior as guardian and you are that already. You could come as my warrior and train in the warriors’ school.”
It was the core of her fear. Since the day of her mother’s death, since Airmid’s gift of the red-quilled feather, the shadow of it had darkened everything. Breaca closed her eyes. The cold engulfed her. In the darkness of her own grief, she said, “On Mona, the warriors are nothing. They haven’t been to war since the time of Caesar. It is the dreamers who sit in the elder council.” It was an overstatement, she knew; warriors who trained in the school on Mona were accorded the highest worth, but that was not the point.
Airmid, understanding, did not correct her. Instead, she said, “The dreamers share their council with those born in the royal line of their people. You are the next leader of the Eceni. If I am called, there will be a place for you, too.”
It was not what she wanted. Breaca opened her eyes. Airmid sat opposite, her face serious. Sand stuck in a feathered line up the length of her arm, like the rib on a leaf. Her eyes were pools to drown in. Every part of her was beautiful. Breaca reached out and took both her hands. They had shared everything, the deepest part of living. It was right that she give her deepest secret. Here, by the gods’ pool with Airmid as witness, Breaca nic Graine, heir to the royal line of the Eceni, gave voice to her secret and made it an oath. “If I go to Mona, it w
ill be because of who I am, not an accident of my birth or a single act with a spear. I will go as a dreamer, or I will not go at all.”
It was Airmid’s idea that they leave the pool and walk up the river to a place where they could swim. No-one was out in the noon heat to watch as they passed the last of the horse paddocks and walked north up the narrow ribbon of marginal land that joined the forest to the water. Away from the village, the land became rougher; good lush meadow gave way to harsher, coarser grasses and then to sand and scrub with the occasional ankle-sucking marsh. At these places, they skirted into the first ranks of trees, weaving out again as the ground rose and dried back to grassland. Upstream, the river was narrower than the stretch that sang past the roundhouse, but faster flowing so that the tune of it was different and the life it gathered more varied. They watched the reed beds for different kinds of lizards and counted dragonflies in three new colours. The forest became denser away from human settlement and the trees changed. Here, there was more pine and larch and silver birch, less hazel and willow. The hawthorn was ubiquitous, stippling the margins with the wind-tattered remnants of white flowers. Breaca picked some and threw them on the water in memory of her mother.
The sun was lower, casting the shadows over their left shoulders, when Airmid called a halt. The river, caught back by an ancient pinch in the landscape, had broadened out again to form a pool, shallower and wider than the one beneath their own waterfall. The forest grew close to the margin, with a short, steep bank stretching down from the roots of the nearest trees to the water. Airmid put her back to the sun and looked left and then right. Taking a few steps forward, she did it again and was satisfied. Pointing up to where a tall beech stood proud of the first rank, she said, “This is the place. Go on up. Sit between the roots and tell me what you see.”
