by Manda Scott
The hares were young and unwary. Graine, who was also young, had listened to others’ tales of hunting: “Watch them from a distance. When you get one alone, that’s the time to strike.”
Dubornos had told her that, the gaunt and watchful singer whom the gods had returned alive from Rome when her father had been left behind. Dubornos had been talking of hunting Romans but hares were not so different.
Graine lay on the damp turf, waiting. Nemain, the moon, sank lower until the hare that lived on her surface could no longer clearly be seen. The whispers of the half-light changed and became those of day. Graine would have preferred an endless night; in the darkness the grandmothers spoke to her from the lands beyond life and she felt she understood the world. In daylight, she had to rely on the unreliable words of the adults around her and they were too confusing.
It was not that they lied, simply that they did not have the same view of the world as the grandmothers did, so that it was hard to know what would please them. Her mother, Breaca, was especially difficult to read and it was her mother whom Graine most wanted to please—if she were alive. That question had ruled the morning and all the time before it since the dark evening with Airmid when both of them had seen things in the river that they did not wish to see.
The grandmothers had not helped with that vision, nor explained it since. With nothing more solid than pain seen and felt, Graine had decided to behave as if her mother still lived and would return soon, counting the Roman dead and, perhaps, quietly impressed by the actions of the daughter she had left behind.
On the mountainside, watched by the hound called Stone, one of the bucks, bolder than its siblings, moved away seeking greener grass. When you get one alone … At a certain moment, when the sun showed her the shine of the hare’s eye and the blue hound ceased to quiver against her side and became instead entirely still, Graine lifted her hand.
The first few strides of the chase froze the child’s breath in her throat. She had seen hounds course a hare often enough but never before had her hound hunted down her chosen hare, her twisting, turning tawny pelt and flash of cream underbelly with its pulsing life and floating run and round black eyes, perfect as polished jet. For a dozen heartbeats, Graine lay still feeling herself a true hunter at last, already illuminated in the glow of her mother’s pride.
This was the heart of her plan: her uncle Bán, the traitor, had been named Harehunter when he was still a boy and a friend to the tribes. It seemed to Graine that her mother grieved for her lost brother as much as she did for Caradoc who had been the fountain of her soul. If Graine could not replace her father—and the years of his absence had shown quite clearly that she could not—then she could perhaps become another hare-hunter, fit to assuage the grief of Bán’s loss.
It would not change the reality of Breaca’s wounding, or the confrontation with the serpent-dreamer, but it might at the very least make her smile. Graine Harehunter. It had a good ring to it. She could hear it spoken by Airmid and see how the Boudica, surrounded by the elders, would accept it and be happy.
So close. Hunter to hunted, hunted from hunter. So close.
Stone was past his prime but fit after a long summer at war. As he ran, he stretched long and flat like a hawk and the distance from hunter to hunted closed until he could strike and almost kill—but not quite.
The hare was well grown and had lived through its own summer of danger. It knew enough of the hunt to save itself from the first strike. White teeth cracked shut in the air where its chest had been but the beast was already gone. Desperate for respite, it jinked and turned on its axis so that, for the first time, it faced Graine who had risen to her feet and stood knee deep in heather. Far away as it was, the hare raised its head and looked her full in the eyes, pleading. Her hare, seeking her help, pleading for the freedom simply to live.
It was not at all what she had planned. Fear cracked over Graine, drowningly. Not her own fear, but the hare’s, the hammering, heart-stopping terror of the hunted beast. Before she could take a breath to shout, it spun once more on its own length, ducked under the hound’s neck and fled back towards her, straight as a spear, diving between her legs for sanctuary.
She would have called Stone off if she could. She did her best, screaming at him until her throat was raw, but everyone knew that when any hound of Hail’s line was hunting, or at war, the only thing that would stop it was a thrown spear. Graine was only six and she had no spear to throw, and even if she had she would never have dared to harm the hound who carried the heart and soul of the legendary Hail and was all her mother had left of her life before Rome’s invasion. She stood stone still in the heather and the hound coursed past her, impersonal as lightning, as deaf, and as lethal.
The hare was an arm’s reach away. Time stretched as it turned and turned again, a third time and a fourth, harepin on harepin, dodging the crunching jaws for a few breaths more of a life so precious that Graine could taste its need to survive as an iron wetness on her tongue. She reached for the beast, desperate to help, and her movement was its undoing. Faltering, it missed the last turn and Stone, excelling himself, stretched that hand’s length longer to reach it. The hare died, squealing, with its chest cracked shut on its heart. To the last, the shining black eyes remained locked with Graine’s, pleading silently for sanctuary and release.
In that moment, at six years old, standing knee deep in wet grass with the half-ghost of Nemain’s moon hazy in the western sky, Graine nic Breaca mac Caradoc, heir to the royal line of the Eceni, understood with crushing certainty the true helplessness of the gods when the forces they unleash with good intent destroy those who have called on them for help. The enormity of it, the illusion of hope when there was only certain death, overwhelmed her. She sat in the grass and cried as only a child can cry, for the hare, who was Nemain’s beast above all others; for her mother and father who would for ever live apart; for herself who was lost in a world of uncertain forces where Cygfa and Cunomar had returned from the dead to lay claim to parts of her mother’s heart that were already too much divided, and last for the brave, big-hearted war hound who had given his all in the hunt and came to her for praise and did not understand why she did not give it but instead clung to his neck and wept.
Airmid, dreamer of Nemain, found her shortly after noon, by the stream in that part of the wood where the sun was least. Graine sat on a fallen birch log with the hound, Stone, lying to one side and the skinned body of a hare on the turf beside her. The skin was stretched out between rocks and had been partly cleaned. The head, messily severed, sat on a rock in midstream, facing west, to the ancestors. A lock of long, ox-blood hair streamed in the water around it, pegged down by other stones. A bald patch showed on the side of Graine’s head as she sat hunched and weeping at the stream’s edge.
The dreamer had searched since dawn for the child who was not her daughter, but had come to hold that place in her heart. Seeing her, a morning’s anxiety flared nearly to anger and fell away to a deeper fear. She stood still, believing herself unseen and unheard. The hound showed no sign of having noticed, but still, without looking up, Graine leaned forward and turned the hare to face across the water towards her. “I wanted to honour it,” she said. “It showed me what became of mother in the cave of the ancestors.”
Airmid could run as fast as any of the warriors when she chose to. Careless of her tunic, she crossed the river’s wet stones and, coming to kneel by the child, took hold of the small, shaking shoulders. A tumble of uncombed hair fell about her fingers; that part of Graine that belonged only to the child and had no echo in her parents or grandparents on either side. It had been pale as winter thatch when the child was born and for a while it had seemed as if the dreams of a lifetime had gone awry, but the deep, ox-blood red had grown through in the first year and had confirmed at least the first beginnings of hope.
Later, as the infant had become a child, the neat smallness of her had become apparent; the fine lines of her features mirrored no-one so much as
her mother’s brother, Bán, with whom Graine shared only the barest splash of blood.
Graine’s eyes alone were recognizably her father’s: the changeable grey that moved with the weather of her soul from the density of storm clouds to the almost-blue of newly forged iron. Outwardly, the child carried nothing of her mother. One needed to understand, and profoundly to love, the souls of each to see the fire blazing in the core and how it was shaped differently in the dreamer and the warrior.
There was little fire to be seen in Graine now, only hurt and a fragile pride. The birch log lay along the bank, shedding feathery strands of white bark onto the loam. Sitting a little away, Airmid brought from her belt-pouch the handful of shelled hazelnuts and withered green crab apples that she had collected at dawn, thinking to share them with her not-daughter. Now, she offered one, staring into the water beyond the hare. “Can you tell me what the hare showed you?” she asked.
In the woods behind, a west wind teased at autumn leaves, loosening them. Graine looked up. Her grey eyes were ageless. “When mother was fighting against the traitor Cartimandua, you prayed to Nemain for help,” she said. “We still lost.”
It showed me what became of mother… Airmid breathed deep and slow and unclenched her hands. She had been with Graine when they had seen the vision of Breaca. It had come hazily through water but even at so far a remove, it had been clear the warrior was dying. Airmid had prayed and dreamed constantly in the three days since, but nothing further had been shown her. Graine, to whom the gods sent visions beyond the minds of any dreamer on Mona, chose not to share what she knew, but instead turned her mind to the lost battles of the summer.
There was nothing to be done to hurry her; a god-touched child is not to be pressed. Wiping a palm on her tunic, Airmid said evenly, “The gods know more than we do of how things must go. We can pray, and must do so. Not everything we ask for will be given.”
“No, or the Romans would have taken ship and sailed away long since.”
“Indeed. But it has always been this way and should remain so. If every prayer were granted, we would become arrogant, and ask for too much.”
Graine thought for a while, then, “Would that be bad?”
Airmid said, “It could be. I think in time we would stop honouring the gods for what they gave us. Then we would truly be godless.”
“Like the men of the legions?”
“Some of them.”
“That would be bad.”
They were quiet a while. It could have been a day like any other. They ate quietly until the nuts were gone. Airmid broke one wizened apple between her palms and offered half. The smell was sharp, like new grass with a sweet, nutty base. Graine took it, unseeing. Her gaze was fixed on the hare’s. Its eyes were open, opaque, like dusted water.
Graine said, “I think … maybe … it may be that Nemain cannot help us, however much we pray? As I could not help the hare, even though I wanted to.”
And so the pegged skin and the severed head became more clear. Stifling a bigger movement, Airmid reached forward and smoothed a lock of stray hair from Graine’s brow. The gods spoke in so many small, indefinable ways. The training of a dreamer was to know how to listen. Here, in the presence of a child who embodied her own dream, Airmid’s whole body vibrated with listening. A magpie flew over and called once, raucous in the morning hush. More quietly, a trout flipped in the stream and landed uncleanly, splashing more than it might have done. A frog croaked, at a time of year too late for frogs.
In these ways, the god warned Airmid to pick her words with care. Twenty years of Mona’s lessons and a handful of years before that in service to the elder grandmother helped her find what to say.
Leaning forward, the dreamer took the child’s two hands between her own. “You may be right. It may be the gods can do nothing, but the hare is Nemain’s beast and if it died, it did so to return to her. Death isn’t a bad thing when it comes at the right time, you must remember that. And you’re not a god, but another of Nemain’s creatures. You could no more have stopped the hare’s death than one of the skylarks could stop you from eating the apple. It’s not in your power.”
“You mean the hare died because it wanted to? I don’t think it did.”
“I don’t think so either. I didn’t say that. I said it may be that it died because its time was right. We can’t know why, but perhaps if Stone, who is the best of hunters, had not caught and killed it cleanly, something worse might have happened later; an eagle might have caught it and torn it apart to feed her young, or a fox cub that had not learned to kill properly might have left it crippled to die of starvation in the winter. Or perhaps simply it was its time to return to Nemain, who cares for it. We, who are not gods, cannot know these things.”
“But Nemain can?”
Airmid took time to think. The hands she clasped had grown cold and then too hot. She turned them over, studying the bitten nails with their constant half-moon of grime. The grey eyes drew her back.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Truly, I don’t. But I think we have to believe so, or there is nothing left to believe. It may not be true. It may be that the hare died because you chose to set the hound on it and there is nothing more. Would you rather believe that?”
In the long silence, the birds sat still on the branches and the frog crooned alone.
“If I believe it, will it make it so?”
“I don’t think what we believe changes anything except ourselves.”
“No … in that case, I would rather believe that it died because it was time for it to return to Nemain. But that means …” Graine faltered. She was a child of six, grappling with questions that had vexed the elders since the time of the most ancient ancestors. Her frown became so complete that her brow flattened tight against the bone.
Airmid said gently, “It means that Nemain sees a greater part of the picture and we see only that which is before our eyes. It means that if your father Caradoc is in Gaul, he is there for a reason that we do not know.”
“And the traitor brother? Why is he in Hibernia?”
“Valerius. He was Bán but he calls himself Valerius now.” Airmid stroked a small cheek that could as easily have been his. “It doesn’t help to think of him badly. I don’t know why he’s there. I can’t reach him or see him. He has closed himself off from the gods’ touch.”
Airmid had not said as much to anyone else, certainly not to Breaca. Graine shivered in the morning chill and it was not simply her skin thrumming to the sound of the god’s voice. Seeing it possible to show the depth of her care without doing harm, Airmid reached forward and drew the young body in to her chest, warming her and holding her close.
The shuddering stilled in a while. Kissing the rich, unruly hair, Airmid said, “We must learn patience, both of us. The answer will be clear in time, if we have to wait for death to see it.”
“Does death make some things more clear?”
“Death makes all things clear.”
“Then the man Sorcha brings on the ferry will know all things by noon.”
The child was exceptional, but some things are beyond even the gods. Sharply, Airmid said, “How do you know that?”
The small face turned up. For a moment Graine looked serious, keeping the faraway gaze that she had learned from the dreamers. Then she grinned and was a child again, bright with triumph at the success of a ruse.
“He was there when I left Sorcha’s cabin with Stone. I saw him ride to the water’s edge and raise the signal. He rode lopsided, holding his belly, and when he tried to dismount he fell and his horse walked away from him. They only do that when a man is dying, Gwyddhien said so.”
The hairs rose on Airmid’s forearms and her throat ran dry. Certain dreams of the past nights became more clear than she might have liked. Distractedly, she said, “If Gwyddhien said so, then it must be right. Did Sorcha go to him?”
“Not yet. She was rising to feed the babe when I left. She’ll be ready by now. You should go. He brin
gs news from the east. The hare told me that.”
“And did the hare tell you what news he bore?”
The grey eyes grew wide. “No. It showed me his brother, who is dead. Mother met him and has his message. She was sick with the wound we saw but the serpent-dreamer healed her. She is going away now and will never come back. The ancestors are with her. They cannot hold her safe any more than can the gods. But they will keep watch so that we’ll know if she falls.”
“Thank you.” So much from the lips of a child. So much held alone for the length of a morning. So much to mourn and to fear and perhaps to plan.
Airmid did not force herself to smile; with Graine, such a thing would be an insult. She rose, holding the child’s hand, and said, “In that case, there is nothing to be done but to greet the messenger. Do you think he will live long enough to deliver his message?”
“He will if we are quick.”
“Can you run?”
“Of course.”
“Let’s go then.”
They ran together along the stony path towards Sorcha’s cabin. A single frog at the river’s edge croaked an autumn song of mourning.
CHAPTER 5
ENCASED IN A PIT, THE FIRE GAVE OFF NO SMOKE, ONLY A haze of burnt air that smeared the straight lines of the surrounding beech trees so that they wavered as if reflected in water. The clouded evening sky behind took on the ripples of the ocean so that Breaca could have been in the cave again, locked in the fever-dreams of the ancestor, but was not.
Dreams might have been pleasanter than reality. She sat wrapped in her cloak with her back to a rock and wished, without hope of fulfilment, for the warmth and companionship of a hound. In the days before Rome’s invasion, no hunter, warrior, trader or travelling smith would have slept under the open sky without a hound to keep the night’s cold at bay.
It was a small change amidst the greater cataclysm of occupation, but it served as a marker for the life that had been lost and was yet one more feather to weight the balance of her decision, should she ever regret it: for the promised warmth of a hound on an autumn evening, Breaca of Mona, once of the Eceni, had abandoned her warriors and the island of Mona that had been her home and her safety for nearly twenty years. She had abandoned the children for whom she had never fully been a mother and the warriors for whom she had been the Boudica, bringer of victory, and, emerging from the cave of the ancestor-dreamer with the wound in her arm half healed, she had set her mare’s head to the east towards the lands of the Eceni and had not once turned back.
