Dreaming the Hound

by Manda Scott

  Airmid had been afraid of this dreamer; Airmid who feared nothing and no-one. Breaca had urged her on through the night’s work, thinking only of Caradoc. Afterwards, she had made herself forget the insidious, enticing voice that had drawn her into the darkest places of herself. She remembered it now, and wished she had not.

  Trapped, she felt for the wall of the cave and braced her back against it, as she might if facing armed men. “You asked that at the cave’s mouth and my answer remains the same: I did not know you when we met last. Now that I do, I will never again ask your aid. I came seeking only the protection of your cave. You gave it and I am grateful. I will leave now, and will not disturb you further.”

  The ancestor’s laugh was the slide of serpents on sand, more terrifying than any legions. Where will you go, warrior? And why?

  “To Mona, where else? The elders must know that Silla has died and ’Tagos taken rulership of the Eceni, supported by Rome.”

  But will you not go east? You who are first born of the royal line of the Eceni, you who should, by right of birth and lineage, wear the torc of the ancestors, given to you to have and to hold as evidence of your care for your people?

  There was a trap in the question and Breaca could not see it. She would have stayed silent, but the pressing air did not allow it. She said, “You heard the message. It is not safe to go east. Efnís was clear that I should stay and continue the war in the west; that only from here was there any chance that we might drive Rome from the land. I will return to Mona with that news. Nothing has changed.”

  And yet the dead have spoken. “If you do not rouse the east, the legions will win.” The standard-bearer’s ghost told you that. Do you not know the truth when you hear it?”

  “I would not trust the words of a Roman, even a dead one. Efnís said differently and would not lie. He cares for the Eceni as much as I do.”

  Do you care for your people? I could not tell. The ancestor’s outrage writhed all about. You who left them in the hands of a milk-soft child and a man who has sold himself to Rome? The Eceni do not love you.

  That hurt, and so was probably true. Breaca said, “I fight in the west to free the east. There are no warriors left in the east. Rome has slain every one with the will and the wit to bear a weapon.”

  But they have not yet bled your people dry. A newly slain legionary sees the oncoming future more clearly than a living warrior. Shall I show you, last warrior of the Eceni, what it is for a people to bleed until there is nothing more to give?

  Breaca saw too late what was coming, and that there was no escape. With her eyes closed or open, the visions were the same, falling in from the black walls of the cave, boiling up from the turbid water, dancing from the solid rock beneath her.

  What she saw was not the tribe of her childhood, with or without the memories of Bán. The roundhouses were gone, taken apart for their wood to burn when nothing else could be found. In their place were small huts and those broken. The land was gaunt, the fields over-grazed, the horses starved, the gods’ pool drained dry.

  Amidst the mud and ruin, stick-thin men and women in cloaks and tunics of Eceni blue gathered around a pen, as at market. All had the earth-stained hands of weeders and planters. Not one was a warrior or a dreamer; none bore the marks of an elder, none stood with any pride or fire or willingness to fight.

  Legionaries in full armour encircled them. Within the centre of these two rings were the children, more than twenty, wide-eyed and terrified. Each one was chained to the next by the neck and ankle. Open sores blossomed where the iron bit. The children wept tears of gold and their parents fell to their knees and scooped them into their palms as if they were corn and were grateful.

  Slavery. The ancestor hissed it, deathly quiet. When they have taken the hounds and the horses, slaughtered the cattle and the deer in the forests, when they have taken the iron that would have been weapons and the bronze that would have been beautiful, when they have melted the torc of the ancestors to make the coin to pay for war, when they have taxed every waking moment and taken the food from the mouths of infants, then they will come to buy living flesh and put a price on that which is priceless. Do you remember the dream of your long-nights, when you were given the mark you use so freely and do not understand?

  Questions within questions within a nightmare. Breaca prayed to wake and to forget, and could do neither.

  Sweating, she said, “I have never forgotten the dream of my long-nights. I pledged then to protect the lineage of my people, to save the children and the elders that their heritage and mine may continue unbroken. I abandoned the battle of the Sea River to save the children. I have fought without cease ever since that they might carry forward the songs and dreams of the ancestors, knowing who they have been and so growing into who they can be. I fight now, risking death nightly, so that my own children and those of others might live in a world without Rome. You cannot accuse me of abandoning the children.”

  The ancestor laughed. Tell them yourself. In the vision, the mass of children parted. From their midst, a small, fine-limbed girl-child with hair the colour of ox blood and a face made old by pain stretched an arm from the slave pen, beseeching.

  “Graine?” Breaca reached to touch her and smashed her knuckles on rock. The vision broke apart, becoming ash. She found herself standing with her back to the fire and the rush of the river too close to her feet. Her bad arm throbbed to the beat of her too-fast heart.

  Desperately, she said, “This cannot be a true vision. I will not believe it. Slave merchants are not permitted to trade in Britannia. The Emperor Claudius forbade it.”

  Claudius is dead and made a god. Enslaved Trinovantes build his temple in Camulodunum as we speak. Nero rules in Rome and Nero is in turn ruled by those who are ruled by gold. If you do not believe me, all you have to do is remain in the west and wait. If you do nothing, what you have just seen will happen. By the mark we both share, I swear it.

  “And if I go east?”

  Then there is a chance that the tide may be turned. You alone are not enough; you must find the warriors in sufficient numbers to fight the legions and give them heart. You must find the iron to arm them. You must find others with courage and vision to lead them if you fall. With these three things, you may have victory. Would you see that? I could show you, my gift of a better future.

  “I want nothing from you. Your visions are not safe.”

  Ah, the arrogance! Still you shall have it, my gift.

  The image was brief, a flash in the darkness showing the familiar pattern of a battlefield; impossible not to watch. Breaca’s vision stretched to meet them as warriors she knew well came into focus. At the left wing, Ardacos roused the she-bears as he always did, they fought on foot, painted in woad and lime, and faced a cracked and broken line of legionaries.

  In the centre, the Eceni forged forward to crush the enemy. She could not see who led them, only the mark of the serpent-spear above. To the right, a woman led the mounted warriors of the west in a wedge that struck at the gathered wings of Roman cavalry and pierced the enemy’s flank. The ranks of the cavalry folded and collapsed and those who wished to live fled the field leaving the centre unguarded. A second wave of Eceni rode in to fill the gap.

  The battle was won long before the killing ended. Slowly, unstoppably, the warriors pushed forward to join in the centre over the mounting bodies of two legions.

  The moment of meeting was exquisite. At the heart of battle, a Roman standard fell and was trampled into filth. The serpent-spear blazed in victory over it.

  My gift, said the ancestor. Mark it well.

  For a long time afterwards, there was darkness, and cool rock, and the river running by. Breaca sank slowly to sitting and then to lying and trailed her injured arm in the water.

  She was not a dreamer to call forth visions, but lying on the cool rock with her face turned to the river she did her best to bring alive her own daughter, that she might see her whole and beautiful and safe on Mona, and not brok
en in the slavers’ pen of the ancestor’s threat.

  Straining so that the sweat beaded her brow, she built a fire that danced on the water, and a hazing of air above it. There, feature by feature, she drew the ox-blood hair and grey eyes, the fine, wine-dark brows and the careful, cautious gaze of Graine, the daughter she had barely seen since her birth. The child of two warriors so tall should never have been so fine and so slender, but Graine was everything her parents were not, and more beautiful for it. Born into Nemain’s light, she was a dreamer from the fine sheen of her hair to the soles of her feet.

  Breaca could not build all of her daughter, only her face, framed by the rich, dark hair, and that took more effort than she had known possible. Then, when she thought she could only make half-formed shapes in an imagined fire, she heard the sound of Graine, weeping.

  The shock of it broke the vision. Where her daughter had been, a hare fled across a hillside, coursed by Stone, last son of Hail, and then Airmid was there, peering through the flames, and Airmid’s voice echoed through the cave saying, “I don’t know how she’s hurt, small one, you have to tell me. I can’t see where you can see.”

  The vision had gone before she realized that the words were of her, not for her, and that, with their touch, the burning in her arm was a little less.

  She did not try to call Cunomar. Her son had barely spoken to her in the three long years since his escape from captivity in Rome. It was no secret that he had failed in battle at his father’s side in Gaul and that every part of him yearned to erase that shame; that he waited daily for the elders to call him to sit the warrior tests of his long-nights so that he might prove himself the man he ached to be.

  As a mother, Breaca felt for him. As a warrior, she knew that the child could not become a man until he had learned to command his own temper—and that the longer the elders deferred their call, the less likely it was that he would find the peace he needed to do so.

  Lacking that final approval, Cunomar hunted the enemy with the single-minded hatred of a wounded bear and his mounting tally of kills did nothing to heal the many wounds of his soul. Waking and sleeping, resentment flowed from him, thick and clear as river fog.

  From the cave dark beyond, Breaca heard the voice of her father, Eburovic. Your son craves your love. Why do you not give it?

  Eburovic had given his life for her and she had loved him before any other man. Alive or dead, she had never heard him speak anything but the truth. She stared into the dark and could not see him, but his presence enfolded her in his care, as the ancestor’s had not done. She was not alone.

  She said, “I have made kill-feathers for my son each time he has slain one of the enemy. I have given him a horse of my own breeding and with my own hands made the knife with which he kills. I loved him and was overjoyed when Luain mac Calma brought him back from Rome. He knows this, but still he leaves the roundhouse when I enter and will not come near me from the summer’s start to its end. My son is a stranger who hunts with the she-bears and I do not know how to reach him.”

  And so you, too, hunt alone, neither desiring nor requesting his company?

  He was her father; she could never lie to him. He was a ghost, who had access to the many layers of truth.

  Breaca said, “I could not hunt with Cunomar. He is not safe. He has killed and lived to tell of it only because the she-bears hunt as a pack and three or more are assigned each time to his protection.”

  The truth broke through the worlds so that she saw her son whether she wanted to or not. In another place and another time, Cunomar turned his head and stared at his mother with a stranger’s eyes. She met his gaze and tried to imagine him weeping tears of gold, and could not.

  Because she had heard Graine, and seen Cunomar, so then also she saw Cygfa, Caradoc’s daughter, who was not the child of Breaca’s flesh but had become the child of her soul.

  As Cunomar had been, so Cygfa, too, had been captured and taken prisoner to Rome with Caradoc, their father. Exactly as Cunomar had, she had stood in the shadow of the cross and thought herself about to be hanged on it. Exactly unlike Cunomar, she had drawn in strength from the core of herself and had not succumbed to bitterness afterwards.

  When Cygfa had gone out to sit her long-nights and came back a woman, ablaze with her dreaming, Breaca had been the one who spoke for her before the elders and hailed her as daughter in all ways but those of flesh, which were ever the least.

  Tall as her father and as beautiful, she braided kill-feathers by the handful into her hair before battle and mounted a horse of her own breeding. Warriors crowded close to touch her blade for the luck it would give and there was no doubt that she would fight well and kill cleanly, and that if she died in conflict it would be only because Briga had need of her in the other worlds. In all the battles since her return from Rome, she had fought at the side of the Boudica, brilliantly.

  From somewhere distant, the ancestor said, You love her as a daughter. The children of your blood see it daily and mourn. Do you wonder that they cleave closer to others than to you?

  Breaca lay on cold stone at the river’s edge, her mouth a desert for lack of water. She was too hot, and too cold, shuddering. Her breath was not enough to give true voice to her words. She answered, whispering, “You twist the truth. My children know themselves equal in my eyes.”

  Are you sure?

  “Yes.”

  She was not sure. Her whispered voice said so, and the rush of the water, and the ancestor’s words, growing ever more faint.

  You are Eceni. It is your blood and your right and your duty. It is not too late to keep the children from weeping. Only find a way to give back to the people the heart and courage they have lost. Find a way to call forth the warriors and to arm them, find at least one with courage to match yours and you may prevail. At the last, find the mark that is ours and seek its place in your soul. Come to know it, and you will prevail.

  The ancestor’s words etched a serpent-spear in the darkness, cast in fire, hung against a summer sky.

  The snake, having two heads, watched past and future, writhing. The spear was crooked, as if broken. Its two blades pointed down and up, to earth and sky, joining the realm of the people to the realm of the gods.

  Others joined it, chiselled into the living rock over and again on the walls of the cave from floor to unreachable roof. Anywhere and everywhere, the twin-headed serpent gazed equally to past and future and the crooked spear lay across, joining the gods to their people. The fire guttered and gave more light, filling the chiselled marks with molten metal so that they came alive and stood shimmering from the walls.

  The light was too bright. It hurt to look at it. Believing herself dying, Breaca turned her head away. “What of my children?”

  Would you have them in the slave pens? If you would have your victory, you must lose them. Better lost now to Mona, where they are loved, than later to Rome.

  The serpent-spears on the walls faded to dark. Only the single fire-cast mark hung against the sky-blue roof of the cave.

  With disturbing solicitude, the ancestor said, There is none other who can do it, else you would not be asked. If you go with all speed, then the tide of Rome may yet be turned.

  “Do you promise me that?”

  I promise you nothing. Only that I will be with you, and that if you ask it, I can give you death, which you may crave, or my aid to live, which you may not.

  She woke to the smell of burning.

  Her cloak lay smouldering on the edge of the fire and the wound in her arm had burst open, leaking an evil-smelling pus. The pain that racked her was more than she had ever known, even at childbirth. She stared up into blackness and saw nothing and heard nothing, only the ever-running river and its echoes into silence.

  After a while, she rolled onto her side and then onto her front and doused the edge of her cloak to stop the burning and then drank a little and then, gritting her teeth, pushed her bad arm into the water and let the current strip it clean.

&n
bsp; Later, still crawling, she found the messenger’s saddlebags and the wormwood and vervain and plantain and other things she could not name that Efnís had sent, in case the bearer were injured on his journey.

  Airmid would have known how best to use them. Breaca did as much as she could remember, and prayed to the gods, not the ancestor-dreamer, for help in her healing.

  She slept again, for a long time, and woke cooler and shaking with hunger not fever and so knew the worst of it was over. She ate from the messenger’s saddlebags, thanking his shade for his foresight and the gift of food, and went slowly to tend the horses. The roan mare knew her and whickered, nuzzling her hair. She stood scratching its withers and teasing out tangles from its mane.

  In a while, because she had been thinking of it and had reached a decision and needed to speak it aloud, she said, “We will stay here in safety until I am well enough to ride and then we will go east. Alone. We may find warriors and rouse them to battle, we may find the iron to arm them, and one to lead them. If we do not turn the tide of Rome, it will not be for want of trying. But I pledge to you now, that if the legions come to take you or your young into slavery, I will kill you, or them, rather than let it happen.”

  The mare knew nothing of slavery, only heard the undercurrents of passion. She turned her head and rested her chin on Breaca’s shoulder and lipped at her sweat-soaked hair and for a while, in the darkness, they were company, one for the other, before the journey east began.

  CHAPTER 4

  A THREE-QUARTER MOON TIPPED THE EDGE OF THE HILL. A wren sang for the dawn. The child Graine lay behind a square-edged boulder with her hand on the neck of a slate-blue hound called Stone. Untrue to his name, the hound did not lie still, but quivered under her touch, his gaze fixed on the steep slope of the hill at the place where the heather of the high land gave way to grass and long stretches of bracken. Hay had been cut there in summer and the grass had regrown to a finger’s height, making good grazing. Graine watched where the hound watched and, as her eyes became his eyes, a triangle of smudged outlines became the shapes of three yearling hares, feeding.