Dreaming the Eagle

by Manda Scott

  “What is it?”

  “Come outside and see.”

  She ducked through the door-flap after the grandmother. In the light of the newly washed sun the thing she carried took solid form and shone, brilliantly. It was her mother’s torc, the sacred one woven by the ancestors from nine times nine gold wires that was the mark of the leader of the Eceni. Breaca had not seen it since the gathering before her mother’s death. The sight of it now made her head feel hollow.

  She put a hand to her throat. In the voice of a child, she said, “It is not for me. I am not old enough. Macha should have it. She is leader now.”

  “Macha is not here. They have come to speak to a woman of the royal line. They will not respect you without it.”

  “Then let them not. That is their choice.”

  “No. In some things, the gods have first say. It is yours. You will wear it.”

  The elder grandmother did not speak now as she would at a birthing, but as she had done in the last council meeting, forbidding war on the Coritani. Elders, dreamers and war leaders from the whole Eceni nation had heard that voice and chosen not to argue. Breaca dropped her hand. Airmid reached from behind to scoop up her hair and hold it high. The elder grandmother spread the end-pieces of the torc and slipped it onto her neck. It settled about her collarbones as if made to fit, and for the first time in her life she understood the change that had happened to her mother when she wore it. Like the sword-blade her father was making, it sang in her soul and lifted her head higher. Wearing it, she knew what it was to walk close to the gods. She turned round. Airmid was biting her lip. There were tears at the corners of her eyes, although the smile that went with them was real and bright. The elder grandmother nodded slowly.

  “See; one must trust the gods even when one does not understand them. The torc is yours and clearly so, whatever your age. Go now and prepare your weapons. You must not appear to the southerners unarmed. Airmid will have your horse ready for you at the gates. Don’t worry, you will have as much time as you need.”

  She had more than enough time. She had thought the grandmother had made a mistake and that they were not coming at all when the first noise rolled out of the woodland and the first horses followed. They came at the gallop, leaving the trees and spreading out to ride abreast along the flat race-ground to the south of the rampart. They were dry now and had taken time to dress with the formality required for a meeting. Their shields had been lifted from the saddle bows to hang from their shoulders as befitted warriors riding beyond their own land. Red-quilled crow’s feathers fluttered in handfuls from their torcs and their warrior’s braids. Their cloaks flew out behind them, yellow as the morning sun. The colour picked the fire from the bronze on their arms and gold at their necks and made it burn more brightly. She would have thought them magnificent had she not remembered the words of Gunovic: Cassivellaunos’s cloak took all the colours of all the tribes, except the gorse-bloom yellow of the traitor Mandubracios. It was a wonder, knowing that, that they had not chosen to wear a different colour.

  Breaca walked the grey filly forward from the gate to meet them. Airmid had braided her hair at the sides in the way of a warrior, weaving the single kill-feather in place. In her right hand, she carried the war spear her father had made for her, ready for battle against the Coritani. On her left shoulder, she bore the shield she had recently finished making. The boss in the centre was of iron, brightly polished to match the spearhead. The surrounding leather was horse-hide, boiled and steeped and painted with egg white to make it waterproof. It had been bare, awaiting her long-nights and the revelation of her dreaming, but today, in order that Breaca not appear a child, the grandmother had dipped a wet finger in woad and drawn on the front face the looping serpent-spear of the ancestors, snake-headed at either end with the spear running across it, joining the gods to the earth. It would come off later if she washed it, but now, newly done, it showed starkly blue against the near-white of the leather and Breaca thought it beautiful. Just before she mounted, the grandmother had painted the same sign on the shoulder of her horse. She felt it pulse like a live thing against her thigh as they walked out onto the plain. The filly felt the same; she moved with her head held high like a colt and her nostrils flaring.

  At the centre place, opposite the gates, she halted. The warriors rode fast, at battle pace, and showed no sign of having seen her. She stood the butt of her spear in the thong that hung from the front of her saddle and held the tip straight up to show greeting and no threat. Still they came on. Far back in the paddocks, one of the new-traded colts lifted his head and screamed a challenge, or a greeting. She thought it might be the blue roan with the white hind leg that was going to be her father’s next sire horse. The unruly bay in the centre of the Trinovantian line tossed its head and received a jab in the mouth before it could scream back. The filly, better trained, snorted a soft answer.

  The warriors pulled to a skidding halt less than a spear’s length in front of her. Only the black-headed one on the brown gelding did it well, but she expected that of him. Gunovic’s words rang in her ears. Togodubnos is the first son. He is a giant for his age, with black hair and a hooked nose. He has not yet killed in battle but he earned his warrior’s tests in good faith. He wore a single crow’s feather and the quill had not been dyed red. She viewed him with the first measure of respect. His gaze, returning hers, was level.

  The rest broke rank, making the line curve around her. Covertly, she searched for the youngest brother, the warrior with the corn-gold hair and the sea-green eyes of his mother. Caradoc is exceptional. If you are in battle, this is the warrior you want at your side. Or the one you might have dreamed of facing in challenge-combat, practising in sleep every stroke and thrust until you knew exactly how he could be beaten. Breaca changed her grip on the spear, feeling the thunder of her heartbeat pulse through the shaft. She examined the line of riders twice more and still failed to find the firebrand. The intensity of her disappointment surprised her.

  The redhead was on her left-hand side, still fighting with his horse. Amminios, the second son, is pale, with sallow skin and eyes that water. His feathers fluttered in the breeze and the many-coloured quills spoke of great deeds in battles. If any of them were true, he was as good a warrior as his brother. Breaca did not believe them. She shifted her shoulder so that her shield faced him and he could see the serpent-spear on its face. He said something in another language and the woman who sat on his right whispered a reply. Breaca did not hear the words but the tone was derisory.

  “My brother believes you follow the gods of the most ancient ancestors, that you bear their device on your shield.”

  It was the black-headed man who spoke. His accent was thick and some of the words were entirely foreign but she made the gist of it. His voice carried more respect than his brother’s had done. He crossed his arms and leaned forward on his horse’s neck, smiling, with one brow raised, as if it were the redhead who was ignorant and they who shared the joke of it. He is a good diplomat. He would make a fine leader did his father permit it. A prince, being groomed for leadership, sent to cut his teeth on the Eceni.

  Breaca considered her answer. Macha and the elder grandmother would have responded without thought. She tipped the shield to face forward so he, too, could see it. “Your brother is wise if he knows the gods of the ancestors. I follow the gods and the dreams of my people going back seven generations. To know of the time before that, one must speak to the singers.”

  “A good answer. Perhaps we will do so.” The black-headed man inclined his head. Beside him, his redheaded brother frowned and asked a question. The woman bent and murmured in his ear. The redhead stared at Breaca and sucked his teeth. His hands jabbed the reins and his horse threw its head up so that he had to sit back hurriedly or break his nose on its neck. It took him a moment to settle it.

  With her eyes on the elder brother, Breaca said, “Your brother would do better if he used a softer bit and held his hands lower.”

&nb
sp; The black-haired man closed his eyes, briefly, as if in prayer. Had he been Eburovic, or Sinochos, she would have known he was fighting the impulse to laugh. The woman to the right of the redhead drew a breath and, with some hesitation, translated. The delay gave Breaca fair warning. The grey filly was already dancing back out of reach as the man lunged his colt forward. It was not an honest match. He was armed with a sword and she with a spear three times its length and she had spent her summer practising against just such an attack. He, if Gunovic told the truth about anything, had spent his summer growing soft on Gaulish wine drunk from glass vessels and plucking the hairs from his nostrils. Certainly he did not know the moves by which a sword might hope to defeat a mounted spear, and his colt was not listening to him. For Breaca, the filly moved as if born to battle. The fight was short and brutal and over too fast. They stopped when the tip of her spear rested on the redhead’s breastbone and the first thread of blood stained his tunic. His horse might have moved and impaled him but his black-headed brother reached for the reins and kept it steady. He was not smiling now although it was not clear with whom he was most angry.

  Breaca said, “Togodubnos, son of Cunobelin, warrior of the Trinovantes, Breaca, warrior of the Eceni, gives you greeting. I was told your brother Amminios had not yet taken his warrior’s tests and yet he wears the tokens of one who has killed many times in battle. Perhaps it is this confusion that angers him.”

  There was absolute silence. The woman leaned forward to translate and was waved back. Breaca had spoken slowly and none of the words was difficult. Moreover, she had used the formal introductions and language of a singer that were universal within the tribes. Amminios flushed darkly, and then paled to less than he had been. Purple shadows stood out under his eyes. The thread of blood at his breastbone spread wider. Breaca clicked her tongue and the filly backed away two paces. Her spear remained level. Somewhere, far behind her, the roan colt screamed another greeting. To Togodubnos, she said, “If you have come to talk in the gods’ time, it does not do well to fight. If you have come to fight, Amminios dies first, I promise it.”

  “And you second? Would you risk that?” Togodubnos was toying with her. He, too, had heard the colt and knew what it meant.

  “Maybe. But this is not a time to find out. I think your brother should put up his weapon. If he is an envoy, he should act like one.”

  She raised her spear and seated it upright in the holder. Amminios had enough sense to sheathe his sword. High up in the paddocks above the roundhouse, the roan colt called out for a final time and was answered. Eburovic’s war-horse had been trained to scream as it rode into battle. It did so now as he crested the hill. One hundred and thirty warriors of the Eceni spread out on either side of him. In line abreast, they hurtled down the slope towards her.

  The Trinovantes swung round in a passable line and moved their shields to their backs, showing that they offered no danger. Breaca walked to the front and led them forward at a slow trot to meet her father at the gates.

  Bán had enjoyed the fair more than any before it. For the first time in his life, he had been deemed old enough to trade. Macha had given him three of her sapling hounds and he had spent a day securing the best bargains. Two of them had gone in exchange for a proven brood bitch brought down from the north. She had whelped twice already and he had examined her offspring. She threw fast, strong whelps with long necks and good eyes and a vivid, buoyant temperament. Afterwards, Macha had agreed that the bitch would make a good mate for Hail when he was older. The third sapling had been traded for a set of three bronze harness mounts with shining black inlays. He had already tried them on his dun filly with the sickle-shaped blaze and knew they suited her. She was still a foal but she was growing into the early promise. He had brought her to the fair, not to trade—he would not have traded her for the world—but to let people see his father’s best brood mare and the wonder of the foal she had thrown. For three days, he had basked in the approval of strangers, as men and women from the far corners of the Eceni lands commended him on the beauty of his foal, on the striking colours of his whelp and on the good training of both. It was the best feeling a young warrior could have, next to being granted his spear for valour in battle.

  He had thought that might come, too, when Dubornos first arrived with his news. He badly wanted to ride out with his father and the other warriors but Eburovic had taken him aside and asked him to stay behind and help protect his mother and the other dreamers. Dubornos, too, had been left behind, while ’Tagos, his cousin, had ridden out, but no-one had told the disgraced youth that it was so he could protect the dreamers. He had simply been relieved of the new horse by his father and told not to make trouble. Sinochos himself had stayed; in the frantic moments when warriors abandoned their ale jugs and collected their weapons and horses, he had picked his group to guard the people. Bán was not really part of it, he knew that, but they let him join them as they discussed their defences and then left him with Hail to guard the door to the great-house while Macha and the other dreamers continued their work to make it ready for the gathering.

  It was not a hard task. The dreamers came and went without noticing that he was there, and there were so many warriors arming around him that he knew if an attack were to come, he would be lucky to see any of the action. After a while, when no-one spoke to him, he sat on his heels and played a guessing game with Hail, tossing a pebble quickly from one hand to the other and then holding out his clenched fists for the whelp to choose which one held the stone. The pup got it right three times out of four and was getting better but the novelty of it wore off too quickly and neither of them had the stomach to play for long. Bán was thinking of running to check on his filly, or to find Silla, who was under the care of Camma and Nemma and probably much less bored, when Macha walked past with an arm full of newly cut pine boughs and asked him to come inside and help her.

  He had never been inside the great-house before. He walked beside Macha, with Hail kept close at heel, on best behaviour in a place of new smells and new people. The great-house was vast, much bigger than the roundhouse he was used to. The making of it was one of the legends told by the fireside on cold evenings. From when he was small, he had heard tales of how the walls and the roof alone had consumed two hundred trees and the preparation before that had lasted for decades; of how the oaks that made the roof beams had been trained by succeeding generations to ensure they grew straight and tall, how the hazel rods woven between them had come from coppices left untouched for ten years at a time to allow them to grow strongly enough to enable a grown man to walk across the roof and not fall through. The thatch that covered the hazel took the straw from every field for a day’s ride in any direction. The first time it was laid, the thatchers had worked for three months without break while underneath them teams of carvers cut the images of the people—horse and hare, bear and boar, crow, eagle and wren—onto the great oaks of the doorposts and the arcing beams.

  The effect was magical. Walking in behind Macha, with the three fires throwing light out to the farthest edges, Bán felt himself surrounded by the living dreams of his people. Then he saw the wall hangings and passed beyond his wildest dreams. On every surface, wolves ran with hares, hawks flew with swans, deer sprang high over snakes. And there were so many horses; everywhere he looked, Bán saw extraordinary, numinous horses, running past him, running with him, running at him. He stopped, halfway from the door, unable to take it all in. Macha dropped her bundle by the nearest fire and came back to kneel at his side. She put a palm to his forehead and looked into his eyes. “Bán? Are you all right?”

  “Yes.” He drew a long breath and made himself look at her and not the pictures. “It’s the smell, the pine and the rushes and the smoke. It was making me dizzy.”

  That, too, was true. He walked on a thicker layer of fresh rushes than he had ever known. The feel of them underfoot spoke of luxury and proximity to the sacred. The scent of cut pine was not new to him, but he had never associated it wit
h the work of the dreamers and had never smelled it so strongly.

  “It’s the resin for the torches,” said Macha. She stood up, taking his hand. “We mix it with tallow and pine needles to make a paste and then we put that on the pine boughs. They burn better and longer like that, and last through to morning. It’s one of the secrets of the gathering. Come and see.” She led him to the nearest fire. A pot stood on the heat, stirred by a sandy-haired dreamer. The air was thick with the vapour, so that Bán’s vision swam.

  Macha said, “Bán, this is Efnís, who comes from the northern Eceni, up by the north coast. He is in charge of mixing the resin. Efnís, this is my son, Bán. He has come to help you with the torches.”

  The dreamer looked up, briefly. He was a young man, not much older than Breaca, with a strained, anxious face and eyes that turned down at the outer edges. “Thank you.” He nodded distractedly, his mind elsewhere. To Bán, he said, “Have you a knife?”

  “Of course.” His belt knife was a small one, shorter than Breaca’s but just as sharp.

  “Good. The boughs your mother has brought must have their side branches cut off cleanly so we can make them into torches. Can you do that?”

  “Yes.” He said it quickly, because he wanted to stay. Bán had never been to the north coast but he had heard it was a place of harsh grazing and poor hunting and that the people lived on dried seaweed through the winter. He had spent the three days of the fair trying to find someone he could ask about this without giving offence and had not yet succeeded. The gods had clearly sent him here to find the answers to his questions. He sat down on the far side of the fire, then thought to look up at Macha. She raised a brow and then nodded. He felt the clasp of her hand on his shoulder and the press of her kiss on his head and the warmth of her smile as she walked away, and he forgot, for the moment, about being a warrior and became instead a cutter of pine, assistant to the dreamers, which was almost as good.