by Manda Scott
“Breaca doesn’t have a dreaming yet, does she?” he asked. “I mean, there’s no one thing that talks to her like the frogs talk to you.”
“Not yet. But it doesn’t always come before the long-nights. That’s why we sit them. And even so she may never have one. Not everyone does.” She had lifted a separate flask from the shelf and was mixing things together in a drinking cup, heating it gently. He smelled wormwood and honey, bitter and sweet. The memory of it made him sleepy.
“But she wants one. She’s always wanted one. That’s why—” He stopped, biting his tongue. He had been going to say, That’s why she’s friends with you, because next to Macha and the elder grandmother, you have the most powerful dreaming. Yesterday he would have said it. Today, he was not sure it was true. Instead he said, “That’s why she has been looking so hard for the right place to sit since last summer.”
“Indeed.” Her voice carried that edge of irony that had frightened him so much before Hail had been sick. She came to sit beside him, cradling the cup in her hands. “Here. This will get you through until morning.” He knew the smell and knew it was true. He did not want to drink it.
“When I am asleep, will you go out to see Breaca?”
“I might do.”
“Then wait. I have something for you to take to her.”
He had his own special place on the far side beyond the fire. He found it by touch and reached into the most secret corner at the back of it, bringing out the thing that was hidden there. He held it out for Airmid.
“This is for Breaca. Hail found it on the other side of the horse paddocks, beyond where Nemma and Camma planted their barley. I think it will help with her dreaming.”
“Do you so?” She was not making fun of him now. The thing slid from his palm to hers and she held it up to see it properly. The firelight touched on it softly, melting the shadows for a little way round. Airmid looked thoughtful. She pursed her lips and nodded slowly. “Do you know what this is?”
“Macha says it’s a spear-head, made by the ancestors. They carved stones and used them for hunting before the gods gave them iron. See”—he was kneeling beside her now, so they could look at it together—“if you look at it here, you can see where they would bind it crossways to the shaft. It wouldn’t be a big spear, not for boar or bear, but they could take hare with it possibly, or if they were lucky a deer.”
“Or a man?”
He hadn’t thought of that. “Maybe.” He sat back on his heels. Doubt struck him as it had not before, but the first impulse had been so strong, he was not prepared to let it go so easily. He said, “I still think she should have it.”
Airmid closed her hand. The spear-head vanished from sight and the quality of the light changed. She slipped the thing inside her tunic and the shape of it made a slender bulge at her belt. “All right. You and I will make a bargain. If you drink all of the cup, down to the grit in the bottom, I will take your gift to Breaca. If it happens that you wake after I am gone, you will not put your head outside the door—saving flood or fire or warfare—before the sun touches the roundhouse. That is my offer. Will you take it?”
It was a long time to stay cloistered, long past his normal waking time, but he reached for the cup. It did not occur to him not to. The taste was more bitter than he remembered from the times his mother made it, as if Airmid was running short of honey. Still, the warmth of it spread outwards from his throat and his stomach, making everything tingle. By the time he reached the dregs at the bottom, the tingling had become a light-headed numbness and he felt the parts of his body lift and spread apart, moving outwards to the far corners and beyond them. He was distantly aware of Airmid supporting his shoulders and laying him down on the bed beside Hail and drawing up the bed-skins to cover him. He did not hear her go out.
CHAPTER 7
Breaca woke to cool fingers laid on her brow and Macha’s voice in her ear.
“Breaca? Let go of the dream. It is time to be up.”
The dream had been violent, a clashing of swords and a thrusting of spears, and men had died with her waking. She lay in the dark and stared at the roof beams and made the feel of it leave her. In its place came the hollow ache of hunger and the greater twist of anticipation and fear. She breathed deeply and thought of Airmid and then of her father. When the crisis in her diaphragm passed, she opened her eyes. Macha was there, leaning over her, dressed and feathered for ceremony. Her face was lean and solemn, with the laughter confined to the lines about her eyes.
“Here. This is for you.” She held out a tunic. It was the grey one that Breaca had worn at the midsummer gathering and not seen since—the one that had once been her mother’s. A familiar knife-thrust of grief added to the increasing fear. She reached for the tunic and slipped it on. Macha helped her to tie the belt and ran a comb through her hair, spreading it long and free down her back in the way of a child. “Are you well?” she asked.
It was the traditional question and it required the traditional answer. “Yes, I am well.”
Macha smiled and did not believe her. No girl on the brink of womanhood could reasonably be expected to feel well.
“Have you everything you need?”
That was not part of the tradition and was, therefore, more important. “I think so.”
Breaca looped her belt tight and slipped her knife in it, tying the hilt-thong to the leather. Her pouch hung on the other side. She opened it and checked the contents: a small, stoppered flask to hold water, a second with a wider neck and a thicker base, to hold the embers from the fire with which she could kindle her own flame, a bundle of dried sage to make the offering to the gods, a smaller bundle containing a wren’s wing for Macha and the foot of the small, fierce, yellow-eyed owl that had carried the dream of her mother. In a separate twist of dock leaf was the thighbone of a frog, which had been Airmid’s gift to mark the end of summer. She worked the leaf open and ran her finger along the length of the bone, using the memories it brought to banish the last dregs of the dream and the persistent ache of fear. She was Breaca of the Eceni and she was going to become a woman. For close to twelve years her waking dreams had been of this time. Since the day of her mother’s death, many of her sleeping ones had been designed to prepare her. She was going to walk out alone and live for three days and three nights with nothing but her own thoughts to guide her, and those thoughts were not going to be mean ones. She took her hand from her pouch and drew the drawstring tight. “Yes,” she said, “I have everything.”
“Good. Come outside. It is time to be going.”
She stepped beyond the door-flap and found she was not, after all, alone with the night. A human snake stretched back from her doorway; the dozen women of childbearing age stood waiting in silence, each carrying a torch to light her darkness, each dressed and feathered, as Macha was, with the precision that spoke of a long night’s preparation. Tears pricked at her eyes. She was taking the first of her steps into womanhood, and she should have expected that the women would come to see her leave. That she had not did them no honour.
The elder grandmother stood at the head of the column. A fox skin hung down her back like a cloak, the fall of it weighted with nuggets of raw gold hung about with eagle feathers. The two wings of a crow arced down from her shoulders to meet at the point of her breastbone. This was why she was the elder grandmother and had lived so long; she had the fox and the eagle as well as the crow in her dreaming, for all that she rarely proclaimed it. And yet she had not dressed like that alone, had not woven the small, rounded feathers from the back of the eagle into her hair with such precision, had not washed her own tunic and dried it in sage smoke with her own hands. For three years, Breaca had been the one to dress the old woman. She had known where the fox skin was kept and how to hang the crow’s wings, balancing them on the sharp angles of her shoulders, with the weight of the body skin hanging down the back, holding them in place so that the tips met exactly in the middle. In a shock of understanding, she realized that Airmid must
have done it as a gift to them both and that, very soon, the duty would pass to another. The cold stab of dread and loss sought out the place between her shoulders again, twisting inwards, drawing at her warmth. She reached past the elder grandmother’s torch and touched the thin stick of the arm that was holding it.
“Why did I not know you would be here?” she asked.
“Because I saw to it that you would not. No woman ever does, nor does any expect it. It is not important. What matters is that this morning you are going out as a child and will come back three days hence as a woman.”
The elder grandmother was being kind, which was not her way. Breaca stepped closer, afraid to embrace her; afraid, equally, not to. The torch flared with her movement. Fresh light showed the milk-white eyes as they looked into hers and laid bare her soul. It hurt too much and she moved her gaze away. The banded feathers braided into the hair of the grandmother’s temples hung in perfect symmetry on either side of the ancient cheeks. The threads binding them were red, black and gold, tied in bands that matched the rhythms of the eagle. Breaca reached out and touched one, taking liberties. It spun as if she had blown it.
“I should have done this for you.”
“No.” The beech-bark skin creased tighter in a smile. “You had better things to do. As did Airmid. She has been with your brother.”
“What?” She stared, wondering if the grandmother was finally losing her reason. She could think of no reason why Bán would choose to go near Airmid if he didn’t have to. The answer came to her suddenly. “Hail?” she asked. “Is he sick?”
“He will live. And, perhaps because of it, you have been sent a gift.” She pressed something small into Breaca’s hand. “This is from your brother and his hound.”
It was a spear-head in stone. She knew as soon as she touched it. The sharp edges of it bit into her palm even as the surface felt smooth and reassuringly cool. It was a pale colour, like the full moon at harvest, and the firelight reflected from it softly. It drew her gaze and all her attention at a time when she needed to be thinking of other things. She closed her fingers, crushing the light away, and looked up at the grandmother. “I thought the laws—”
“—said that you must take nothing of the male with you. I know. We have discussed this.” The old woman nodded past her to where Macha stood waiting to escort her to the gate. “In some things, the laws are not immutable. They are there to protect the vulnerable, not bind the strong. We think you may need this and that you will know what to do with it. Take it with you and listen to what it tells you. Learn what it can teach.”
The spasm came back to her diaphragm, blocking her breathing. “What if I hear nothing, Grandmother? What if the gods don’t speak?”
“Be patient. Listen. They will speak.”
She did listen. She had listened. She was listening. The gods had not spoken.
In the first hours, Breaca had been concerned to say her prayers, to gather wood for the fire that she needed to burn the sage and to lay out her dreaming tokens in a circle around it. Later, shrouded in the skin of a she-bear that had been, indirectly, her father’s parting gift, she had fidgeted, cursing the late, lazy midges that fed on the exposed parts of her skin. She had built up the fire then, and laid damp beech leaves on it to make yellow smoke that swirled up past her cheeks and kept the biting things at bay. Later still, in the dark part of the night, she had slipped into sleep and let the fire go out and cursed herself for doing so. Her dreams had been as they always were of men with spears and bloodied swords, seeking her mother’s life or her own; they were not a real dreaming.
The second day dawned slowly, with more rain and a thickening mist. She saw the rising of the sun no more than she had seen the rising of the moon the night before. That which had been black simply became less black and settled finally to a dull, undulating grey. Even the trees on either side became ghosts, vague shapes that loomed in and out of sight with the waxing and waning of the fog. The day grew colder and dead leaves fell with the rain, slithering down the tree trunks to infiltrate her stacked-branch shelter. More rain followed and soaked into the bear-skin until it stank of wet dog and old bear grease and urine. Her mind sang the names that would stick to her when she returned to the women’s place without a dream but with, instead, a sheath of bear-stench around her that no amount of washing would clear through the winter. She loathed her father for having made her the gift and herself for having accepted.
Sometime in the third day, time lost its meaning. The quality of the light had not changed since dawn. Without the sun and its shadows she had no way to measure the space between moments. She took to counting the drips that fell from the front of her shelter until the rain fell so fast that they ran together to make a stream and could not be counted. She listened to the forest, to the smothered cries of the jackdaws, the magpies, the crows, the battling jays and the squirrels. As she listened, they left her, one by one, and the woods fell quiet. She turned to the river for solace but it was swollen with autumn rain, thick with mud and dying leaves so that it ran sluggishly and in silence. Its only offering was the mist that hung over it, sickly, like smoke from a poor fire. The ancestor mound sat squat and sullen on the horizon, devoid of the magic that it had held since the day Airmid had first introduced her. Breaca watched it for an age, aching, praying to each of the gods in turn for a sign, and saw nothing.
Day moved to evening and stole the light. Her stomach griped on its emptiness and her spit dried so that she began to pray that the river would flood, simply to allow her to drink. In despair and in memory of something Airmid had told her, she sat still and counted her breaths and her heartbeats, letting her own body set the rhythms of time so that she would know it had not stopped altogether. The world dissolved to a blurring of greys and her life moved with the rush of blood in her ears.
At the end, it was the needs of her body that drove her from the shelter. She had taken neither food nor water since the first hint of her bleeding and had thought herself empty of both. In this, too, she was wrong. She held on until the pressure in her bladder became too much to bear and then shrugged out of the skin and eased herself away from the grasping roots of the tree. When she stood, the urgency was less and she took time to observe the requirements of the ceremony. The dreaming tokens were not to be left unguarded. She walked round the dead ashes of the fire, picking them up.
The west, nearest her shelter, was the place of water and dreaming, Nemain’s place, sacred to women and the night; Airmid’s frog bone was there. In the north, home of earth and rock and mountains, she had placed the wren’s wing from Macha, who had been to Hibernia and Mona and knew the mountains well. South was the fire and the full sun of summer and it held the foot of the yellow-eyed owl that had been the dream of her mother. The east, place of air and wind, home of the eagle and the fleet-running hare, had been empty for most of the first day. In her imaginings through the summer, she had left it free for the symbol of her dreaming, so that she could return from the other world and draw the image first on the empty patch of sandy loam as she had once drawn a frog for Airmid. Now, in the real world, with the earth so sodden and covered in wet leaves that it had taken an age simply to clear a wide enough space to light a fire, drawing on the earth seemed a childish fancy. Sometime in the dark of the first night, it had become clear that she needed to fill the gap and she had placed Bán’s stone spear-head there. It had glimmered, gathering firelight and folding it outwards, making the circle whole. Later, after the fire had gone out, the curves on its surface still glistened, catching what light there was and holding it for her. She had been grateful during the day and now, standing, she lifted the stone last and held it in her hand for a moment before slipping it in the pouch with the rest.
Beyond the grasp of the trees, the world was different. The river was running faster than she had imagined it and was less clouded with mud. The mist had thinned and the rain had stopped and the quality of the air was better. The river danced and sang and small fish fl
ashed at the margins. Out on the eastern horizon, a gap appeared in the clouds showing a night sky. A haze of moonlight brightened the far bank and, in the stars, the shield arm of the Hunter pointed up towards the Hare.
Breaca slid down the bank to the place where she had lain with Airmid and walked forward until the pool lapped at the bare skin of her feet. It was cool but not cold and the feel of it was refreshing after the insidious damp of the rain. She walked slowly downstream, feeling the grate of sand between her toes and the coil of the river around her ankles. At the place where the flow ran fastest she stepped sideways onto a stone, lifted her tunic clear of the surface and squatted to urinate. Small clots of blood slipped out with her water and flowed downstream. She felt better afterwards. The hollowness of hunger had become a part of her and the new emptiness matched it. Standing up on the stone, she turned east to study the stars. The rent in the clouds widened until she could see the spear held aloft by the Hunter. The tip of it pointed east to the far horizon with the crisp imperative of an order. She took a step further out across the river—and stopped.
In all the hours of instruction from the elder grandmother and Macha, in the long talks with Airmid, it had been impressed upon her that she must find a place to sit, to light her fire, to lay out her tokens. At no time that she could remember had she been forbidden to leave that spot; it had been her assumption that she should stay there, but it had not been said. She considered the matter intently. In this, it was as important to abide by the spirit of the law as by the letter. Presently, when she was sure that she was breaking no unspoken rules, she stepped out onto another stone and then another.
