by Manda Scott
He felt his head grow light, as it had done in the great-house. Amminios looked discomfited; he had not expected to be standing in the gods’ stead.
The exchange was made quickly. Breaca had told him the proper words of apology and the way to make the gift. At a nudge from his brother, Amminios stepped forward to take the lead ropes and give his thanks. His accent was thick and barely comprehensible and the phrases perfunctory. He stepped back, holding the lead ropes as if he were not sure what to do with them. The mare followed with reluctance. The filly twisted her head back and whickered to Bán.
Before he could respond to it, Togodubnos stepped forward. In a voice designed to carry he said, “My brother is not familiar with the language or customs of your people, but I pledge in his name that the gods’ gift, made on the gods’ day, will be treated with the respect due to Belin, the sun, who is most sacred to us and our father. I swear it on my honour as a warrior.” In the crowd, knife-blades beat on wood again, briefly. Amminios frowned.
Togodubnos bowed, with his arm across his chest in the mark of a warrior’s respect, and turned to the elder grandmother. More softly, he said, “I came last night before the council with a request from my father, Cunobelin. May I know the council’s answer?”
“You may.” The elder grandmother’s smile held the barest shadow of Amminios’s poison. “The council has considered the request and the events that surround it. It is our decision that there will be no war. This you may tell your father—that the tree of friendship does not feed on blood. It requires Briga’s earth and Nemain’s water to allow it fully to flower. To you, we would say that you are a man of honour who is bound by blood to men who are without honour. There will come a time when you have to choose. If you choose the waters of friendship over the blood of your kin, you will be welcome amongst the Eceni. If you do not, you will be slain, as will all our enemies.”
For Bán, the sight of Amminios’s face was a flicker of light in darkness.
CHAPTER 6
“He’s going to die, isn’t he?”
“Everything dies, Bán. Some die sooner than others, that’s all.”
“But is he going to die now—of the sickness?”
“He might do. There’s no blood in the scours, which is a good sign, but he’s still very cold, which is bad. If we can make the mixture properly, then he might live. If we sit here and talk about it, then, yes, he will die. Keep him close to the fire and watch the water. Tell me when it comes to the boil.”
It was midmorning and everyone was awake and busy although not too busy, it seemed, to walk past on their way from here to there to see what was happening, even if “here” was in the far opposite corner of the settlement and “there” only a step or two distant. It had been all right while Bán was out with Airmid gathering the plants, for no-one had known what was happening. Now that they were back and had built a fire outside the harness hut, word had passed faster than he could have imagined until everyone had heard that Hail was sick and Airmid was tending him, and felt the need to visit and see if it was true.
It had started badly, in the time before dawn when all the world was asleep apart from a boy and his sick hound whelp. Bán had been standing in the dark in the river, washing Hail clean of the foul-smelling scour, when the splash of another’s wading and an adult shape looming in the darkness had told him he was not alone. He had stood still in the freezing current with pebbles jabbing into his feet and clutched Hail tightly to his chest. A voice floated over the water, dryly amused. “Is he sick, your hound?”
It was a woman, but not Macha. He breathed in relief. All night he had been praying to Nemain who ruled the waters and it seemed she might have answered him. “He’s got the scours,” he said. “I was waiting for dawn so I could take him to the elder grandmother.”
“Were you so?” The woman’s voice ran with the roll of the river. He didn’t recognize it, except to know that she was laughing at him. She said, “Then you may wait a dawn or two yet. Your sister has come into her bleeding, Bán of the horse-dreams. She’s in the women’s place with Macha and the grandmothers. They’ll be in there for a few days yet, barring warfare, fire or flooding.”
Bán stood numbly. The news slammed into him like a fist in the gut. Hail squealed in the sudden tightening of his grip. “When?” he asked, and then, because the timing was less important than the fact that he hadn’t known, “Why didn’t they tell me?”
“When was last night, as the moon rose. As to why they didn’t tell you, you would have to ask your mother that. Had you been in the roundhouse, you would have seen them go, but sleeping apart as you are, I expect they did not think it needful to wake you up.”
“I was awake,” he said miserably. “I was watching over Hail.” He thought of his prayers and his promises to the shape of the moon in the water and how they were wasted and he wished that the gods had found some way to tell him before it was too late.
The woman took a step closer. “So. I’m sorry you missed them. They will be sorry, too, if they come out and find your whelp dead. There isn’t anyone who doesn’t care about him after … all that has happened. Perhaps I can help you?”
She was close now, standing at ease beside him in the racing water, as if it were her home, more so than the land. He looked up and saw with despair that it was Airmid and, therefore, he was finished. The cold in his feet had welled up to his heart and frozen it.
“I don’t… I can’t…” It was the cold that made him stammer, he would swear it.
“Be still, I won’t eat you.” Her smile had a knowing slant to it. Her voice was the same as it had been from across the river. He heard it differently now. “You don’t have to believe everything you are told about me.”
“I don’t.”
It was true, if only because half of the things he had heard about Airmid contradicted absolutely the other half. The older boys hated her. It was said, when she was out of range and the other girls were not listening, that she had done permanent damage to Dubornos when he had tried too hard to ask for favours. Bán had not been privy to the conversation in which the exact nature of the damage had been explained in detail, but it was widely rumoured that the youth would be lucky if he could sire his own children when he came to full manhood, and certainly there had been a month or so in winter when it was clear to everyone that he was walking lame.
That was one half of it. The other half came from Breaca, which should have made it more reliable but had not. Breaca was the eyes and limbs to the elder grandmother, which was a great honour but also very dangerous. Airmid had been her predecessor and had stayed five years with the old woman before crossing to adulthood and it was this, according to the older boys, that was the source of her madness.
Bán had spent the past two and a half years watching his sister closely for signs of similar insanity and was daily relieved not to see them. Nevertheless, Breaca did not consider Airmid mad and had said so, even after the incident of the spring floods, when the older girl had turned up at the roundhouse with her hair all awry and her tunic not belted and a wild look in her eye as if she had been too close to the gods. It had not been Airmid’s fault, clearly; she was a dreamer and they were all known to be different. Bán was lucky, he knew, that his mother was not in any way like the others but then Macha had the wren as her dreaming and the bird of the gods kept her sane. Airmid, by contrast, had missed out on the luck; her dreaming was the frog and proximity to water was known to drive even the strongest of women mad. Dubornos’s injury notwithstanding, Bán was not sure that Airmid was one of the strongest women. She was certainly not one to whom he would willingly have entrusted the life of his hound.
He had been considering whom else he could ask for help when Airmid had waded forward out of the river, drawing him with her. She had taken Hail from his arms as he negotiated the bank and walked back to the rampart so fast that he had to run to keep up. At the gates, she had presented him with a choice that was no choice.
“If we
go up to the high paddocks to pick some plants that might make him better, will you help me?”
She had Hail. He would have done whatever she wanted.
“I will try.”
“Good.” Her smile was almost like Breaca’s. “That’s all the gods ever ask of anyone, that they try.”
Bán was trying. It was all he could do. He had picked the plants she had indicated and helped her carry them back to the fire. Dawn had come while they were in the high paddocks, and by the time they returned, word had spread and everyone not intimately involved with Breaca’s long-nights had come to see if the rumour were true and to offer help in Hail’s nursing. Airmid had thanked them with the same wry courtesy she had shown to Bán all morning and had told them that they would be called upon later if the pup survived the initial dosing. Sinochos, when he came back a second time, had been asked for more firewood and had gone out to gather it. He had sent his son, Dubornos, to bring in the first load, which was an unfortunate choice, if made with the best intentions. The youth had dumped it as far away as he could without dishonouring his father and then he and his friends had stood at a distance taunting Bán, making graphic and insulting gestures when they thought Airmid couldn’t see them. Bán kept his attention on the water rising to the boil in the pot on the fire and considered the battles he would have to fight later to prove the madness hadn’t tainted him.
“If you don’t fight them, it will upset them more.”
Airmid was sitting close by, grinding river clay and mallow roots to a paste in a bowl she had dug out from amongst the elder grandmother’s private things. Bán studied her, covertly. There was a chance that what she had said did not mean what it seemed. She measured a length of washed root, cut it in pieces and dropped them into her grinding bowl, counting aloud as she did so. When she reached the right number, she began grinding again. Without looking up, she said, “Your friend with the thin hair. It will hurt him more if you don’t fight him over this.”
He did not risk a glance at Dubornos. It was true that the boy’s hair was thin; when it was wet, it straggled down to his neck like rats’ tails, just like his father’s. It was the rest of what she said that bothered him. “He’s not a friend,” he said.
“Does he know that?”
He shrugged, as he had seen his father do in the face of danger. “He does now.”
“Good. So then you won’t have to prove it. There are four of them and they are all twice your age. They’ll tear you in pieces and it will serve nothing. Wait until Hail is better and then show them what he is made of. He won’t let you down. I was there when he was born; the grandmothers knew before you ever got there that they had seen the birth of the best hound yet born from Macha’s line, they just had no idea what to do about it until you walked in with your dreaming. Let your hound get well again, then train him up and show them that he’s the best. It will be better than fighting.”
She raised her eyes from the bowl, sweeping a fall of dark hair from her brow with the back of her hand. The movement made the sleeve of her tunic fall back to her armpit and the mark of the frog’s foot—the one that Dubornos had mocked so savagely—was suddenly visible on the inside of her elbow. Bán had never seen it before. It was not the harsh, acid colour of his imagination, but a deep blue-green, like copper left to weather, picked out in small dots on the place where it would be closest to her heart. He stared at it for too long and, when he looked up, found she was waiting for him, watching, and that she knew what he had been looking at. It seemed likely that she knew also what he had been thinking. He raised his eyes to her face. Her gaze was clear and grey, like the clouds when it rained. Her smile was open, without the earlier twist of irony. Returning it, Bán saw her properly for the first time. He thought again of what it was to be bonded to the water and felt the weight of his opinion swing over, as it had been threatening to do all morning, to the opposite position. Breaca had been right; Airmid was not mad. The wrongness of his earlier thinking stuck in his throat, twisting painfully. Hoarsely he said, “The water is near to boiling.”
“Good. You come here and stir this. I’ll look after that.”
To hoots from the distant Dubornos, he swapped places with her, taking over the bowl and grinding stick while Airmid lifted their carrying sack and tipped the contents onto the grass between them. A scatter of different plants fell out, half of them tall with wide oval leaves and prickled stems and bell-shaped flowers the colour of mare’s milk that hung in clusters from the stems. The rest had smaller, greener leaves that shone like a wet river pebble and neat red flowers that flecked the stem like drops of blood. As he watched, she sorted them swiftly into bunches of each kind and began tearing them up to drop in the water. When both bunches had gone, she started stirring. “You can come and look,” she said. “Just don’t stop grinding the paste or it will stiffen.”
He shuffled closer to see what she was doing. The pot on the fire was a wide one with a zigzag band of decoration near the rim and a pinched lip for pouring. As he looked in, she pushed the last of the comfrey under the water and he saw the veined grey-green leaves disintegrate. The rest took longer to succumb. Airmid stirred carefully, watching for the point when the knotgrass leaves lost their sheen and the red from the flowers bled into the white of the comfrey. At the moment the colours merged, she pulled the pot off the heat and scooped in more water until it was cool enough for her to put both hands in and begin shredding the leaves, rubbing them to nothing between thumb and forefinger, squeezing the colour into the water. She was done when the clay paste was just becoming hard to handle and the infusion was a deep, mossy green, flecked here and there with the cream and scarlet of the fragmented flowers.
“There should be an empty flask by the grandmother’s bed. Can you get it?” Airmid was frowning, staring at the liquid. Talking was an effort. Searching inside the roundhouse, Bán found a flattened oval flask with a narrow neck stopped with a plug of rolled horse-hide.
“Here.” He carried it back to the fire.
“Good.” She was biting her lip, still holding the focus. “So now all we need to do is pour the liquid into the clay and mix the two together. When the colour is all the same, we pour it into the flask and it’s finished.” She looked up, suddenly, her eyes wide and warm. “Do you want to do it?”
“No!” he said, shocked. And then, “Can I?”
“I think so. He’s your hound. You want him to live more than anyone. It should be you who does the last thing. Look”—she reached over and took the grinding bowl from him—“I’ll pour. You stir. That way we do it both together. Just make sure you imagine Hail well and strong after-wards—it helps the medicine.”
She poured, he stirred. The paste flowed in spirals into the green broth of the infusion. The clay slipped off the flowers, leaving them as particles of colour in a steadily greying sludge. The smell was of turned earth and the cud of marsh-fed cattle, high on the vapours of myrtle. When it was ready, they poured it together. Airmid rested her elbow on her thigh, pouring from a height to make a thin stream while Bán held the medicine flask steady below her. When it was full, he pushed the stopper in and she turned it over to check that it didn’t spill.
“Right.” She grinned like a girl. “That was the easy part. Now we have to dose him. One of us needs to hold him with the head up, while the other tips the mix into his mouth. We give him only enough to make him swallow three times. He needs it nine times in daylight and three times overnight. When the scouring stops, we can go down to three times in the day and once in the night.” She eyed him pensively. “Can you do that?”
“I can do anything.”
“I believe it.” Unexpectedly, she swept her fingers lightly through his hair. “Let’s get started and see if your hound can do the same.”
——
It was long past nightfall and Bán was exhausted but doing his best not to succumb to sleep. Hail lay beside him on a bed of clean grass. The whelp’s breathing was slow and level and his eyes were no
longer sunk back into his head. The last time they had dosed him, he had sucked the medicine greedily as he had done before weaning when he was still on mare’s milk. He had passed no scours since dusk and his urine was normal. Best of all, he no longer smelled rancid. Airmid had said he would live and Bán believed her. She sat beside him now, propped against the wooden wall of his sleeping place, dozing as he did. He felt the weight of her arm round him, pulling him into her side, keeping him safe. The frog’s footmark pressed against him and he no longer feared it. It joined the other shapes that came and went from the dreams—of hares and horses and spearmen and Breaca sitting her long-nights alone in the forest. Her hair was a deep red, like oxblood, and it shone in the light of the moon.
Later, he woke without Airmid’s arm round him. She was a shadow seen in the poor glow of the fire. He heard the sound of the medicine jar, gurgling. He pushed himself up on one elbow.
“Airmid? Can I help?”
“No. I’m fine. He’s taking it on his own. Go back to sleep.”
He was awake now, more alert than he had been. Fragments of his dreams disturbed him. “Why are you not with Breaca? She will be going out on her long-nights when the dawn comes. Should you not be with her?”
“She needs to be alone. That’s the point of it.”
“But don’t you need to be there when she goes? To give her your blessing?” He was guessing and she must know it; he had no notion of the rites of the women any more than he had—yet—of the men.
“Maybe later.”
Hail finished drinking. With a sigh, he paced a circle on his grass bed and settled back to healthy sleep. Airmid stoppered the medicine jar and put it back on the shelf she had made for it. Now that she was closer, Bán could see that she had changed since the morning. The dark mass of her hair had been carefully combed so that it fell in a flat sheet to her shoulders and she had twisted it back from her brow with the strip of rolled birch bark that marked her as a dreamer. The tunic she wore was a dark one, not the pale wool she had on when she first met him at the river. In the shadows it was difficult to see the colour but he thought it might be dyed green. A pair of bear’s teeth on either side of a polished, peat-darkened horse’s footbone hung on a thong between her breasts, clacking softly as she moved. Frogs in different poses were carved on the bone. The sight of them brought him back to where he had been.
