by Manda Scott
It was an offer, and a promise, and a gift of greater worth than he could ever have dreamed. Bán saw the moon blur and slide sideways, becoming two. At his side, Corvus pursed his lips and whistled, thoughtfully. At length, he nodded. “If the gods will it, I will be there,” he said.
CHAPTER 14
The Eceni departed before the mariners. They gathered at daybreak, two days after the Warrior’s Dance and half a day before the newly named Sun Horse set sail with the evening tide. The morning dawned bright to welcome their leaving. A cold mist lay on the ground, pushed back by the fires of the great-house and surrounding dwellings. The horses stamped and snorted and the fog of their breath added to the white in the air.
Breaca sat the grey mare at the gateway while the others in her party spoke their last farewells. Cunobelin waited with her. She had expected him to turn out in full ceremonial dress, clashing gold on bronze and iron with enamelling and jewel-work between. As was his way, he had confounded her. He stood bare-headed, his hair straw-soft in the sun, his cloak the simple gorse-flower yellow of the Trinovantes, stripped free of other adornment. His sword hung from his right shoulder in the way of a warrior and his shield was bull’s-hide on wood with no mark of tribe or rank so that he could have been one of the wandering heroes from a singer’s tale, brought back to mortal lands for the length of a dawn. He stood at her horse’s bridle and offered short, acerbic comments on those who gathered to leave.
The partings were not all easy. Macha had spent three nights alone with Luain and looked strained as she mounted her mare. Mac Calma had business in Gaul and had accepted Segoventos’s offer of a berth on the ship’s maiden voyage. He had promised to return to the roundhouse on his way back to Mona but no time had been set for his arrival. It was a pattern that had been played out before and the pain of it was old and plain to see. Habit had not made it smoother.
Bán was happier. He stood tall by the Roman, his face aglow with pride, joy and the grief of parting. Since the day of the dance they had been together, riding or training with swords and spears. Breaca had noted the care with which the Roman had taught her brother the ways of the legions, that he might be able to defend himself should they ever come face-to-face. He was saying something now in his accented Gaulish and Bán, laughing, replied. His voice cracked mid-sentence and jumped down the scales, finishing in a register that matched Luain’s. It was not deep, but it was resonant and one could hear where it might go.
Without thinking, Breaca said, “He is no longer a child.”
“So it would seem.” She had forgotten Cunobelin was there and might hear. The familiar acid humour laced his voice, overlying other more serious things. “We go to all lengths to set tests of manhood that will stretch those newly grown so that they will feel as if they have truly achieved against great odds. Then sometimes the fates—you would say the gods—intervene and the workings of man are left redundant.”
“He will still have to sit his long-nights in the autumn. The elders will not grant him his spear without it.”
“Of course. His manhood must be seen before the people; he would want that. But in his heart he knows the truth and knows that others have seen it.”
He was right. It was there in the way that Bán held himself, in the ease with which he shrugged off the sudden slide in his voice and accepted the gift of a knife from the Roman, giving a spear-blade in return. A small sliver of pride burned in Breaca’s heart, a lost thing in all the cold parting. “He won well,” she said.
“He did, but it was his care for the boy Iccius that made him a man.”
That, too, was true. Iccius waited behind Bán, a fair-haired child, overhorsed on Amminios’s highbred bay. The touch of freedom had already changed the way he looked.
Others were gathering. With a jolt, Breaca saw Airmid waiting far back near the great-house, dishevelled and distracted and not yet mounted. She had spent the final night collecting plants in the woods and meadows beyond the walls of the dun and returned in the fading light of predawn carrying a wrap laden with fescue and sage and the first pale yellow flowers of agrimony. A woman—Lanis—who was sister to the one with the sick child, had gone out with her and had returned with her hair bound back by a thong of birch bark at the brow and the wistful, far-distant look of a dreamer—or newly made lover. They walked together towards the horse barns. Dubornos scowled viciously as they passed, which might, in other circumstances, have been amusing. Breaca busied herself with the fit of her girth strap and said nothing.
“She is not riding with you.”
She looked down in surprise. The Sun Hound jutted his chin towards the women. “Lanis,” he said. “She is not riding with you. Her sister’s child is still close to death and she is the only one with any chance to keep it alive.”
Danger pricked down Breaca’s back. Healing was the work of the dreamers and Cunobelin had skinned his dreamers alive, leaving them nailed to their sacred trees. Only Heffydd had lived, and that because he had forsaken his dreaming. She looked at the Sun Hound, considering. In all of their dealings, he had never failed to answer a straight question. “Is she safe to stay here?” she asked.
“Yes. I have spoken with Luain mac Calma. He has accepted my word, sworn on the eagle of Rome and the badge of the Sun Hound, that I will not harm her. She will travel to Mona in the autumn. Mac Calma will have warriors sent to guard and guide her.”
It was not said with ill intent. The facts signalled a change in the way of things as the first foal signals spring, and none of it had any bearing on Breaca or her life. Her choices were her own and their consequences hers to bear. Still, she was glad to see Caradoc ride over to take his leave of his father. If nothing else, it gave her reason to look elsewhere.
She drew back, not wanting to witness the final parting between father and son. She had not forgotten, nor would she readily forget, the skill with which the Sun Hound had manipulated the news of a death and the lengths he had gone to keep it secret. Word of it had travelled after Caradoc’s meeting with his father and seemed spread throughout the dun by nightfall. Certainly it had moved fast enough for Odras, when asked to name the hound whelp on the night before their leaving, to choose to call her Cygfa in honour of a dead warrior of the Ordovices, and no-one had thought to question it.
The parting between Caradoc and Odras had been private and no-one had questioned that, either. Caradoc had not returned to her his armband but they had exchanged other less tangible gifts and it had not made the last day easier. There had been a while when Breaca had been afraid Caradoc might stay and that there might be difficulty between the young warrior and his older brother but it had not happened. As she had predicted, Luain had absolved Caradoc of the blood-guilt, after which the youth had been equally free to take ship with Segoventos, to remain in his father’s dun or to ride west to his mother’s people. His request to ride north with the Eceni had been unexpected, but not unwelcome. In the strange anticlimax that marked the end of the visit, she had been grateful for the offer of companionship.
Caradoc was the last to bring his horse up from the barn. With his arrival, the group was complete. Eburovic rode up behind Breaca, with Macha and Airmid following. Dubornos, silent this once, rode at his dreamer’s side. For two days all of their paths lay together. Then, at the border with the Eceni lands, Airmid would turn west and ride for Mona. None knew, nor had any way of knowing, when she would return. It was easiest not to think of it. The last riders joined the line. ’Tagos and Sinochos brought up the rear, leading a string of riderless horses, each laden with gifts from the Sun Hound, and it was time to go.
Cunobelin returned to her side, his hand once again on the grey mare’s bridle. He had spent the night in feasting and talk with Eburovic and looked none the worse for it. His breath smelled faintly of wine overlaid with horsemint but neither to excess. His eyes were as Breaca had first seen them: full of dry humour and a depth of understanding that was both alarming and perversely comforting. It occurred to her, too late, that if she could ha
ve learned to trust this man, he would have been a peerless ally. She tried to imagine it and failed; after the forge, it was impossible to view him as anything other than dangerous.
Nodding as if she had spoken, he raised his arm and gripped hers at the elbow in the simple parting of warriors. “Are you ready?” he asked.
“No. But we are unlikely to be more so. I think we should leave.”
“Good. Then I will clear your path.” He signalled behind him and eight men pushed on the beams that held the gates. With a groan like falling timbers, the two halves swung outwards. The meadow below was silent and empty. It had not been thought necessary to order a cattle market for their leaving.
He walked with her as she pushed the mare forward through the gap. “You will be back?” he asked. As with everything he said, it was both a question and a statement.
“If the gods will it.”
His eyes mocked. “I will pray for their intercession.”
They passed through the gate. The others threaded behind, saying final goodbyes. The Sun Hound reached up once more and clasped her hand. She felt the ridged calluses of sword and spear and then, surprisingly, the swift press of a ring. Looking down, she saw a flash of gold with the emblem of the sun and its following hound raised on the surface. He had worn its twin on the small finger of his left hand throughout the visit. She twisted his hand round, trying to see if he wore it still, and for the first time his face creased in an open, honest smile.
“It’s mine,” he said. “I would not permit it to be copied. Take it. The gods have not seen fit to grant me a daughter. Now, perhaps, I have the beginnings of one. If you need help in the name of the Sun Hound, it will be given, even to the ends of the earth and the four winds.” It was an old oath, and it fell oddly from the mouth of a man who had made clear his disdain for the gods.
She might have answered directly but Caradoc reached her, drawing up on her other side. His presence touched her, warning.
“Thank you.” She tried the ring on her fingers. It stayed well on the fourth of her right hand. “I will take care of it. If the Eceni have need of your aid, I will remember.”
“Not just the Eceni,” Cunobelin said. “You. There is a difference.”
They rode in subdued silence, following tracks that ran along the edge of the Sun Hound’s coppiced woodlands, with patchwork fields of newly planted corn and beans to one side. It was late spring, the time of hardest weeding, and the fields were full. Workers paused to hail them as they went past. Caradoc was recognized by his hair and the colour of his cloak and he paused often to wave and call a greeting. Late in the morning, a man recognized him from a distance and sent his son, a boy of less than Iccius’s age, to beg a ride with him for a few hundred paces so that he could say later in life that he had ridden with the greatest warrior ever to come out of the dun. The lad was unwashed and had hair lice and Caradoc lifted him up and set him down again like a cherished son.
Further out, on the higher, less fertile ground, they passed fields of livestock, bounded by ditches. Long-horned roan cattle fed straggling calves. Nursing ewes, taking umbrage at the unseasonal heat of the day, rubbed themselves clear of wool on the hawthorns. Here, too, there were shepherds and cowhands and always someone to hail them, to talk and exchange news of the dun and its occupants. It slowed their passing, but not badly.
At noon, they forded a stream between two stands of willow and stopped in their shade for a meal. Sinochos organized it; he had saddled the packhorses and knew where the most perishable supplies had been placed. Breaca hobbled the grey with the other horses and walked alone along the riverbank until she was clear of the trees and could sit freely on the sandy bank with her feet trailing in the water. The river ran fast for its depth and the touch of her heels made sinuous wavelets on the surface. Small fish crowded at her toes, thinking them insects. A heron passed overhead and came to rest on long-stilted legs upstream of where she sat. She looked for frogs, or signs of their young, and found none.
She lay back on the bank and closed her eyes. A clatter of ducks took off downstream, roused by the horses, or one of the men splashing in the water. ’Tagos shouted and Dubornos replied, then Sinochos joined in and one of the women from the northern coast, and it seemed suddenly that all of them were bathing, hurling water and oaths and washing away the smoke and smear of three days under a foreign roof.
Breaca stripped and slid into the spring water alone. The cold made her gasp. She plunged her head under and stood with her feet on the bottom and her arms spread wide, letting the current strip her clean of the dun, of Cunobelin and his machinations, of Amminios and his sneering evil. She opened her eyes and saw the light from the surface made green. Her arms were ghost limbs stripped down to nothing, flesh pared from bone until all that was left was the core of her, and the grinding pain of Airmid’s leaving. She let her breath out in a stream of uneven bubbles and kicked for the surface. The world came back, light and loud and full of others’ laughter. She kicked for the bank and pulled herself out onto the warm sands to dry in the sun and then to dress in a tunic that had been clean and no longer felt so.
Lying on the bank afterwards, she listened to the familiar rise and fall of Iccius’s questions and Bán’s succinct and careful answers. Underneath them, at the edge of her hearing, someone walked softly over sand. She thought of frogs and kept her eyes closed.
“You did not wish to eat?”
It was Caradoc. It could have been worse. She opened her eyes and rolled her head sideways. “No. Thank you. I have had meat enough for a lifetime. I can live without more.”
“It’s not only meat. There is cheese, and malted barley, and oats ground with hazelnuts wrapped around with dock leaves.” This last was a Trinovantian delicacy and he knew that she liked it. She might have eaten it for his sake but the thought of food made her stomach clench.
“Thank you, but no. I would rather not eat for now.”
“As you wish. It may all be gone now in any case. Dubornos is eating like a bear in case food is scarce on the journey west to Mona.”
He said it plainly, with the familiar bite of humour, and she was grateful. The others had stepped round the topic of Mona for days, as if it could not be mentioned in her presence. Not even Eburovic had dared speak of it openly in her hearing. She said, “Food won’t be scarce. They will be travelling under the protection of the grey cloak of Mona. Wherever they stop, they will be fed as if they came from the gods.”
“Dubornos thinks Airmid should avoid contact with the Catuvellauni or the Coritani. She might be wise to listen.”
“I don’t think so. Only your father dares ignore the sanctity of Mona and he has promised them safety. They will not be harmed by warriors of any tribe and even Dubornos can see to the wolves.”
“Possibly.” He sat at her side. He had changed his tunic for one in darker wool of coarser weave and his neck was bare of the torc. Seeing it gave her a warning of what was to come.
“You are leaving us?” She felt a twist of disappointment. She could laugh with Caradoc as she could with no-one else; his presence would have brightened the spring.
“Yes. I’m sorry. Segoventos will hold the ship for me at a port halfway down the river, but only as far as tomorrow morning’s tide. If I don’t reach him then, he’ll sail without me.”
“So you are going to Gaul with Luain?”
“Only briefly. Whatever I said to my father, I must go west and speak with my mother’s people, if only to let them know the facts of Cygfa’s death. There are ships that sail from Gaul up the west coast. At this time of year, two or three leave the ports every month. I will find passage on one of those.”
“You could ride with Airmid. The route to Mona passes through the lands of the Ordovices.”
“I could, but I am too easily recognized to pass for long unnoticed. My father would hear of it and send men on my trail. This way, I can be at the dun of the war hammer before he has word that I am not still with the Eceni.”
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br /> “Lest he try to make you a studhorse.” She smiled faintly. “I remember.” She remembered other things of the conversation in the forge. “Your father has men already with the Ordovices,” she said. “They will return with word of your arrival.”
“No. He may have other spies, but he will not hear anything further from those who killed Cygfa.”
There were many ways in which he mirrored his father. The ability to speak of death without emotion was not yet one of them. He tried, but the edge of it hardened his voice. She studied the set planes of his face and the grey expanse of his eyes. “Dead men bear no witness?” she asked.
He shrugged. His gaze did not flinch from hers. “The elders will meet in council as they did for the Roman. The decision will not be in my hands.”
“I think your voice will count for something. It did so with the Eceni and you were not one of us.”
“Then I will think carefully before I speak.”
He would vote for their death. It did not need to be said. She would have done the same.
She picked another stalk of grass and chewed on it idly. With her forefinger, she drew a war hammer in the sand, followed by the symbol of the sun hound. “Did you know them?” she asked. “Your father’s men?”
“I believe so. Three men of his honour guard were missing for the duration of our visit. They would have been present had it been possible.” He leaned over her drawing and smoothed out the sun hound, replacing it with a serpent-spear, well drawn. “They are of an age between Togodubnos and my father. They taught me my weapons as a child. One of them gave me my first battle mount. I would have trusted all and each of them at my side in war before any other man alive.”
“But they killed Cygfa and so they must die.” She drew a frog, because she was not thinking, and rubbed it away with the heel of her hand. “She was your cousin, is that not so?”
“She was to me what Bán is to you.”
“Ah.” That made it different. “Did Odras know that?” she asked.
