by Manda Scott
The gods show the many possible futures … it is up to the living to manifest what is offered.
The ancestor-dreamer had said so on parting, speaking from the hound stone as Breaca scoured clean the last of the grasses in fulfilment of her promise, then stood on it to mount her horse.
She thought of that later, riding east on poorly trodden pathways, focusing on the smaller sacrifices that the larger ones might not overwhelm her. It was not hard to find things to mourn: the loss of Stone, who was her best war hound and the last remaining son of Hail; the loss of the dun stallion who should have covered the blue mare in the spring and the yearling filly who was their daughter and would outclass both of her parents; the loss of the many hunting knives that lay on the shelf beside her sleeping place in the great-house; the loss of the ancient blade with the feeding she-bear on its hilt that had been her father Eburovic’s and his father’s before him and his mother’s before that, back through the years to the distant history of the Eceni.
That blade should have gone to Cunomar on his long-nights, and might do still; Ardacos knew where it was kept and would do what was right, speaking the words of the giving as if he were father to the child-made-man, not simply his mentor. Cygfa could not be present at the ceremony—only men could take part in a boy’s long-nights as only the women stood vigil for the girls—but she could braid his hair for him afterwards with Airmid and Graine when he came out to join—
Breaca stopped, cursing her undisciplined mind. She had never thought herself weak. She did not wish to do so now.
Breathing tightly, she raised her head and looked beyond the fire to the place above the treetops where the half-circle of Nemain’s light made silhouettes of leafless branches. When she had lain above the Roman camp, the moon had been in the last day of waning, too old to show at night. Now, it was halfway to full, and casting shadows on the landscape. Five days had been lost as she healed in the cave, each one a lifetime.
The night was less still than it had been. A damp wind billowed from the south, spreading the haze above the fire low and flat. The darkening trees bent their heads to the north and the sky beyond sparked with early stars. The roan mare shifted, snuffing the breeze, then shifted again and blew out gently through her nose.
Move!
It was not the ancestor who spoke, but the oldest part of Breaca’s mind, which was wedded to the serpent-spear and to life. She rolled to her feet, shedding her cloak and sweeping it over the fire pit to hide the glow. Her slingstones were in one hand and her sling in the other and she was already within the shelter of the trees, moving silently over rain-damp leaves and pressing through undergrowth that eased forward to let her through and closed behind her afterwards, denying that she had ever been.
Go south; the wind is from the south, and it brought the scent of man to the mare.
Breaca circled south, soft as owl-flight, exchanging her sling for her knife, the better to kill in close cover. Her mare stood as if carved from granite, a thing of the night. The rising steam from the fire-warmed cloak would eventually betray to the trackers the fact that she had been in the clearing, but it would not give away her new position.
The enemy was alone and well hidden. He lay still beneath a stunted blackthorn and only the pale smudge of his hair let Breaca see him. He was not, therefore, Roman; of the invaders only the Gaulish cavalrymen were so coloured and they did not have the skills for this. He would be a Coritani scout then, a traitor from the eastern tribe, neighbours to the Eceni, who favoured Rome, and whose best scouts were paid well in gold to hunt their countrymen. Breaca had killed two of his kind in recent days and had not found them any more skilled than their Roman masters, simply more careful in open country.
She waited, watching, then pressed her knife-blade into the dirt and, with her free hand, sifted through her black-painted stones. Two had red snake-lines on the black, painted on Mona, when the serpent-dreamer was a safe and distant memory. Breaca knew them by the sharp pain they raised in her palm. She eased one from the pouch and cupped it in the belly of her sling. These two alone not only crushed the life from the enemy, but extinguished the fires of the soul. It was a fate fit for a traitor and even the godless Coritani were learning to fear it.
Presently, as the steam from her cloak became smoke, the scout rose from his hiding place and eased forward, squirming on his belly, silent as a snake. If the strategies of his tracking were fatally flawed, the quality of his movement was exquisite; a sinuous flow that disturbed neither leaves nor small branches, but sent him forward to where she had been.
Where there was one tracker who knew his craft, there may be two. It was the knowing of that stayed Breaca’s hand when the tracker emerged beyond the blackthorn and the red and black slingstone could have killed him. The Boudica had not hunted alone so many winters to be caught by a warrior prepared to sacrifice himself to trap her. She watched the place the scout had rested, waiting.
“He’s good, isn’t he? But not as good as you and me.”
The murmur was part of the night, a sighing of soft breezes. The voice was a friend’s and the last she might have expected to hear.
“Ardacos?”
She turned, slowly. The small, wizened warrior grinned at her from the base of a beech tree. Ardacos led the she-bears and was the greatest proponent of their art. He fought naked and on foot, smeared in the grey woad-stained bear’s grease that gave him his power, painted with lime-clay to terrify his enemies. He was not painted now, nor did he stink of bear, but he was naked, save for a knife belt, and his body merged with the land around it as a stone might do, or a sleeping bear. Breaca saw him because he chose to let her. In all probability she had passed him in tracking the tracker and had not felt the first hint of his presence.
Surprise waxed briefly to anger and then to a stabbing anxiety. Ardacos had been sent by the elders once before to find the Boudica and bring her home. She did not wish to have to fight him for the right to continue east.
On a silent breath, she asked, “Why are you here?”
“I am sworn to protect your son in your absence. The she-bear asked it of me and I consented, gladly. Where he goes, I go. Whom he hunts, I hunt, even if the quarry is his mother.”
Ardacos nodded forward and what should have been obvious became so: that the scout who tracked the Boudica was not a Coritani traitor but Cunomar, her eldest child, son of his father in so many ways—but not enough.
Cunomar had reached the edge of the clearing and was working his way forward through the beeches. Breaca felt the weight of the red-painted stone in the fall of her sling. The understanding of how close she had come to killing him left her light-headed with fear. The ancestor’s voice echoed in her mind. If you would have your victory, you must lose them …
“But not like this.” She spoke aloud, not meaning to.
Ardacos shook his head. “I am here for his protection. I would not have let you throw.”
“No?” With her eyes, she measured the distance to Ardacos. Two spear lengths separated them. They could argue for the rest of their days over whether it might have been enough.
She said, “I don’t understand. Why is Cunomar here? And why is he tracking me when he could ride in and share the fire?”
“Could he so? He thinks not. Your daughter believes you have left us and so now, for the first time, your children are united in their fear and their loss. They would bring you back, or join you in your flight. Your son believed that if he rode to your fire, you would be gone before he reached you. Was he not right?”
It was late and Breaca was tired and her mind had not yet fully recovered from a spear wound gone bad. She said, “Cygfa believes I have left Mona? How does she know?”
Ardacos ran his tongue round the white edges of his teeth. He hissed disapproval, or despair. “Breaca, you have two daughters and it is not Cygfa who is the dreamer, but Graine, your daughter-of-blood. She dreamed your wounding and knows that the grandmothers and the greater ancestors wished yo
u to travel east, but not why they sent you away from us. She did not know, either, if you would be well enough to travel.”
He reached out and touched the red and swollen edges of the healing wound on the Boudica’s arm. In a different tone, he said, “I have said before that you should not hunt alone. The spear went deep.”
“But not too deep, and the one who cast it is dead. He—”
“Mother?”
Sometime in their conversation they had stopped whispering and, hearing them, Cunomar had abandoned his stalking. He stood in the centre of the clearing, staring at where he thought they might be. Like Ardacos, he had hunted naked and the newly risen moon brightened his hair and the white skin beneath. In so many ways he was the image of his father, and yet so clearly flawed.
Breaca made herself see the small fragment of Caradoc, outweighing the burning fact of the red-striped slingstone held in her hand. Standing, she smiled a welcome. “I’m here. If you could lift my cloak from the fire pit before it burns, I might wear it yet through other nights.”
He stared at her, blankly. Unlike Ardacos, he wore both the lime and bear-grease of the she-bear warriors. As if to make the point, he had painted as much of the bear-skull on his face as was permitted a boy not yet past his long-nights. White circles ringed his eyes and narrow lines ran the lengths of his cheekbones, ending in a spike that rose up to his brow. He was a stranger, as he had been since he stepped off the boat that had brought him from Gaul. The ancestor had said so and Breaca had denied it. Here, now, she understood the many layers of the truth, and the price she had pledged to pay.
Better lost now, to Mona …
She said, quietly, “Cunomar? It was a good stalking. If you’ll lift my cloak …?”
He stared at her a moment longer, then did so, stiffly. White smoke billowed up and was followed by a wash of air-starved flame.
“Thank you. There’s wood by the upright stone behind your left foot. If you feed the flames, we can sit warm at least, while you tell me how you tracked me this far. Rome’s Coritani scouts would pay in gold to know that.”
She was speaking as she would to a child and her son heard it. He crouched by the fire pit and the flames lit the unworldly skull-marks on his face. Resentment and mistrust patterned the features beneath. His gaze flickered to the sling that hung from her hand and rested there.
“Did Ardacos stop you from killing me?” So much pain in the currents beneath the words.
Your son craves your love. Why do you not give it? For love, there must first be truth, and it was a long time since Breaca had given that to Cunomar.
She was about to lose him. Knowing that, she sat on a stone and spoke for the first time as she would have done to his father. “No, Ardacos did not stop me from killing you, although he might have tried. I thought you might be a sacrifice, sent forward to draw me out. I waited to see who was behind you.”
“And, because I was not a Coritani tracker in the pay of Rome, the one waiting behind was Ardacos, protector of the Boudica’s children. When father fought in the Battle of the Lame Hind, Dubornos was set to look over me. Now he cares for Graine and Ardacos must keep watch over me instead. It must be very tedious for them both.”
Breaca stared into the fire, seeking answers, and found none. “You could ask him,” she said. “You will have time enough to thrash it out on the journey back to Mona.”
A shadow joined them. Even in firelight Ardacos contrived to be half seen. He carried with him a bearskin wrapped in a bundle. Laying it at her feet, he said, “I brought you this. You should not return to take the torc of your people without it.”
“How do you know I’m going back to take the torc?”
Ardacos said, “One of Efnís’ three messengers reached Mona alive. He died on the straits without crossing over but Airmid heard his message and understood then what Graine’s dream had shown. You are returning to take the rule of the Eceni from ’Tagos, if he will let you have it. To even think of such a thing, you should have your father’s blade, and your own.”
He unwrapped his bundle by the fire pit and two swords lay together on the flat leather of the bear hide; the feeding she-bear on the pommel of the larger overlapped slightly the serpent-spear that marked the smaller, so that the two intertwined and became one. Eburovic’s she-bear blade carried the soul of her ancestors back too many generations to count. Its loss had been one of her many sources of pain, but Breaca had carried the blade that bore the serpent-spear into every battle she had ever fought and she had not dared begin to mourn it.
Reaching across the fire pit, she lifted the serpent-blade now, feeling the small thrill of death it always carried. A deep peace followed that she had not missed until its return. “Thank you. Some things were easy to leave behind. This was not one of them.”
“And we were?” Ardacos asked it, tightly. In his own way, he was as wounded as Cunomar. He had been her lover once, after Airmid and before Caradoc, and had believed himself trusted with all things.
“No, of course not. How can you think it? But I would not ask you to hang on a Roman gibbet simply because I desired your company for—”
A twig cracked under a misplaced foot. They were warriors, even Cunomar; before the shattered silence had closed around them, they were standing in the dark beyond the fire pit. Breaca’s cloak lay once again across the fire, hiding the glow. The wool steamed and then smoked, sooner than it had done before. Three knives carved the moonlight, dimly.
The twig snapped again, then a third time and it was evident that it had not been broken by accident but deliberately, as a signal.
“Is your family now the enemy?” The voice came from the trees, not blood-family, but heart-family, amused and certain of welcome. Cygfa led her horse forward into the clearing, bright-haired and alive with the night.
“Your dreamer was left without her sworn warrior and your daughter without her mother. I said I would return both to you, or you to them. I had not realized when I promised it that you would be so hard to track. I would never have found you if Ardacos hadn’t been on your trail and Cunomar before him. You really should lift your cloak from the fire. It’s too good to keep burning it.”
In every way, Cygfa was Caradoc’s daughter. Her half-smile was his, taking the sting from the words and adding back something different and more difficult to bear. For the space of a dozen heartbeats, the young warrior stood alone in the still moonlight and Breaca had time to pray to Briga and to Nemain that the worst had not happened. Then the beeches shook and Airmid and Graine stepped forward and the night stopped and it would have been so very much better never to have left the cave.
“Airmid—”
They had not come alone. A shape blurred at Airmid’s side and then, released, sprang forward. A hound did not understand the complexities of the ancestors and their visions but Stone, last and best son of the war hound Hail, heard pain in the voice of the one he loved most and knew that he alone could heal it.
A hound, at least, could be welcomed fully without risking the destruction of the ancestor’s visions. In more pain than she remembered since Caradoc’s capture, Breaca knelt and opened her arms. Stone crossed the last strides of the clearing as if he were coursing game and the gathered members of her family, of blood and of spirit, watched as the Boudica buried her hands in the mane of her battle hound and a woollen cloak smoked thickly beside them.
It was Graine who lifted her mother’s cloak from the fire pit. She was too small to hold it up. Singed wool swamped her, trailing on the ground. Smoke stuttered upwards from a place near her shoulder. The fire, given air, flickered to life again and the orange glow lit her face from one side, leaving the other half to the dark. Patched thus in light and shadow, her small features were set hard so that she might not weep.
“We all found you,” she said, in case it was not obvious. “I dreamed the beech trees and Cygfa found your trail. Airmid knew when you were close and that Cunomar was already here.”
She stood squar
ely, a spear’s length from her mother, her child’s fists clenched tight across her chest. The Boudica’s daughter would never shed tears in the presence of others, but the prescient dreamer who had wept for her mother’s pain, a day’s ride distant, and then dreamed of her in a forest might well do.
These two fought each other in the soul of a child so that tears trembled on her eyelids, forbidden to fall. Graine took a step back until she came up against Airmid, close behind, and she could slip her small hand into the dreamer’s for comfort.
Hairs pricked on the back of Breaca’s neck. Somewhere distant, the ancestor laughed.
… better lost to Mona, where they are loved …
The truth laid her bare, like a knife. Even half understood, it had been easy to follow the ancestor’s logic: far better for all of those she loved to be safe in each other’s care in the west, than to risk them in the broken lands of the east where the cost of failure was paid by children shackled in slave pens. Seeing the truth laid out so starkly, in Cunomar and then in Graine, cut away all doubt, crushingly.
Breaca rose, ready to say so, and found that Airmid was standing where Graine had been and that it was not, after all, possible to speak. She sat down again, slowly.
Airmid stood very still. The dreamer was taller than the child would ever be; age-threads in her hair sparked in the full spill of light and the dreamer’s thong at her brow glimmered as if sewn with the scales of living salmon. A string of silvered frog bones circled her neck, the only outward mark of her dream. Her eyes were dark tunnels in the firelight.
