Dreaming the Hound

by Manda Scott

  Breaca had picked the darkest of the three spears, blessed by Nemain, god of night who guided both Graine and Airmid. She raised it to shoulder height and turned to face Eneit. The governor copied her. Silence enclosed them. In a world where time passed in a heartbeat and was eternity, they waited.

  The crowd could have filed out and been replaced by cattle or crows and Breaca would not have known it. Her world was Eneit and the wind and the change in length of a single, crisp linear shadow that was the heron-spear, with its dangling feather. The muscles of her throwing arm burned. The pain lived outside her and was not important. Eneit shrank until he was only a caged and beating heart. He swayed and she swayed with him. A raven settled on each of his shoulders and she knew she was not seeing the world as others saw it. She slowed and stilled and only the beat of her heart shivered the tip of the spear. Its song settled about her, rich with moonlight and the joys and pains of motherhood and the beckoning whisper of the ancestor-dreamer and the gods as they—

  “Throw!”

  The word struck Breaca’s soul as a hammer an anvil, releasing the pain of the song. Her arm moved of its own intent. The spear thrummed and flew with a will apart. She watched its flight as if time had stretched and the air become thick as blood, slowing it. The circling wind in the centre of the orchestra teased the blade, drawing it down; she had aimed high expecting it.

  The tip settled on a line for Eneit’s heart. Relief drenched her prematurely. Sweat greased her palms, which had been dry. On the edge of her existence the crowd sighed. The second spear caught up with hers and they flew together, converging on a single space. She blinked and both spears became one, became two, became his and hers and hers and his and one or other struck skin and she did not know whose. The elongated blade slid cleanly between ribs that barely shifted as Eneit, in a final act of outstanding courage, drew in and held his last breath. The spear-song ended, exuberant, and all grief and joy were hers.

  She felt the punch to his heart as her own and saw the third of Briga’s ravens descend. Eneit jerked back and a little to his right. The second spear, which had aimed truly for the centre of his chest, hit a rib, glancing sideways before it sank into flesh. By will alone, the boy held himself upright one last moment and fell back heavily onto sand. A single member of the audience shouted approval and was hushed.

  The heat of waiting sucked the air from her lungs. Flushed and breathless, the governor said, “He’s dead. I have never thrown more truly in my life, but I could not say which spear is the more central. Theophilus, as our adjudicator and our physician, will you tell us which of the two spears made the kill?”

  “I’ll try. You should come with me. Waiting here won’t make the answer any different.”

  Eneit lay on his back, his eyes open to the vacant sun. The spears stood upright, their hafts trembling a little on the closing beats of a twice-pierced heart. The blades were a hand’s breadth apart in the boy’s chest and at differing heights. The paler of the two sat in the rib space above the darker.

  Theophilus, unwilling to kneel and reduce the dignity of his office, leaned over and studied them a while. Presently, he said, “I feel like an augur staring at the cut surface of a liver on which nothing is written. The boy’s heart is the size of a man’s fist across and a little longer from apex to base. It lies in the chest slightly to the left side and the top is behind the nipple. I would need to open the chest and examine the body in greater detail to be certain, but I am as sure as I can be that each of these spears has hit the heart and that either one alone would have killed him. If this were a Greek contest, the prize would be equally split between the two contenders. That may not be so in the rites of the dreamers.”

  Most emphatically, it was not. Still soul-struck, Breaca felt the blood flood from her head and return, sluggishly.

  The governor, who was still studying the spears, said, “Not bad, I think, for two warriors, long out of practice.” He stood and extended his hand to take Breaca’s. “My lady, in the rites of your ancestors, which of our tribes would have been said to win the battle?” He did not ask, And which of us, as the loser, would have died?

  Breaca had no idea, and no way to find out. One spear must kill and the other fall into dead flesh, one warrior win, the other forfeit not only the contest, but life; the gods did not allow it otherwise.

  A decade’s training on Mona furnished her with the words the governor wanted. Knowing it untrue, she said, “I think it possible the battle would have been won equally by both. It would have been a sign from the gods that the two tribes were to be allies.”

  Quintus Veranius smiled as a youth might smile, having asked a favour and had it granted. “Then the third spear should be lodged by us both together. Perhaps, if we are careful, we might not damage the blade and I can have at least one whole representation of your craft to hang on my walls as a reminder of this day?”

  Theophilus brought the third spear. Under his direction, they each held the haft and slid it together with extravagant care into the left side of the boy’s chest then drew it out again, leaving only a smear of new blood across the skin as evidence. The governor took possession of his new prize and had his cloak brought so that he could clean the blade before nesting it in the raw wool within the gift-box.

  Breaca felt a shadow cross hers and turned. Corvus was walking over the sand towards her. He saluted, crisply. In Latin, he said, “Congratulations, my lady. I have rarely seen so sweet a throw. If you will allow me, it would be my pleasure to escort you back to the stands.”

  More quietly, in the language of Mona, which he should not have known, he said, “Your son Cunomar has gone. Cygfa asked for permission to follow. I would have given it, but Graine said not. I am thus revealed as a man who takes orders from a seven-year-old girl-child. My only consolation is that Cygfa heeds her also. I think you should talk to them both. If, as Graine believes, your son intends to sit his long-nights and is caught, he will suffer the same fate as this boy would have done. The crosses are still empty. They thirst for blood as deeply as does the third of your spears.”

  III

  MID-WINTER AD 58—AUTUMN AD 59

  CHAPTER 18

  THROUGH ALL THE YEARS OF CHILDHOOD DREAMS AND THE many more of adult desperation, Julius Valerius, who had once been Bán, brother to Breaca of the Eceni, had never imagined that he would pass his long-nights in a dreaming chamber in the heart of a stone-built mound in the wild lands of Hibernia in the company of a hound whose sheer size would terrify him, nor that he would pass the time in deeper terror at his own impending failure.

  The hound had been there from the start. Valerius had brushed against it as he crawled in through the lightless tunnel into the chamber and it had risen, grumbling, and pressed its nose to his face so that he had known it was as big as Hail, if not bigger, and that it resented his intrusion. Then, he had not known how small the chamber was, only that the tunnel had finally opened out so that he could rise from his elbows and knees and he was grateful for that.

  Stretching his fingertips to touch the stone, he had found he could touch both walls and press his head to the roof without ever standing fully upright; thus a mound which, from the outside, had looked large enough to house half the elders of Mona was reduced on the inside to a space barely big enough for a war hound and a man to stand together.

  The hound had not wished them to stand together. The grumble had risen to a snarl, increasing in threat until Valerius sat on the earthen floor and pressed his back to the stone wall and drew his knees to his chest. He had been an officer in the emperor’s cavalry, had led armies into war and burned villages to the ground, and a single hound reduced him to the smallest space he could occupy.

  He would have laughed at the absurdity of it, but the beast was too close. Instead, he had spoken to it in Eceni as if it were Hail and it had calmed a little, circling and then stretching out along the far side of the chamber so that the wash of its breath had flavoured the air, sending currents round the clo
se curves of the walls to warm the back of Valerius’ neck.

  In its own way, the presence of the hound helped to balance the claustrophobia of the chamber. The smallness of it left him mute at the same time as he marvelled at the means by which the ancestors had taken a mass of stone that would have built the outer wall of the emperor’s palace and shaped it instead into a perfect beehive to protect the sanctity of the chamber at its heart.

  Lacking any other distractions, the man who had once been an engineer to the legions explored by touch the place that might well become his coffin and the last repository of his soul. Square-edged stones pressed into his back, as sharp as the day they had first been cut. The stone pavings of the floor met with joins so finely matched that he could not pass a fingernail between them. Only a shallow dip, worn exactly where he sat, gave testament to the hundreds—the thousands—who had sat through their long-nights in exactly this place in the generations since the ancestors of the ancestors first built the mound.

  Each of those who sat before had, presumably, known exactly what it was the gods and dreamers required of them. Valerius sat in ignorance, increasingly afraid of his own fear and his own lack of knowledge. He had expected instruction and had been given none and there was no way, any longer, to ask for it.

  Mac Calma had sent him in and it was the memory of mac Calma’s voice that filled the breathless air. When you were dreaming, which gods did you petition, yours or mine?

  “I have no gods.”

  Valerius had said it first in the paddocks behind the dreamer’s hut on Mona. He said it again, quietly, now, to the hound and the waiting dark and did not know whether the silence that rolled back was a good sign or bad. At the very least, he believed that what he said was true: Mithras had spoken to him once in a cave in Britannia, and the gods of the Eceni had shown themselves in Rome by their actions, but none had touched his life in the five years since he had first set foot on Hibernia and he had no reason to think they would do so now. He had not noticed the moment when he had become free of the gods, but he had believed it a good one; his life was more peaceful in their absence. He had no wish to see them return, except that, without their direct intervention, the rite of the long-nights was doomed to failure and Valerius to an ending more final than death.

  Mac Calma had been clear about the risk of that: You must know … any failure means death, not only of your body but of your soul, and that even I, who am Elder of Mona, cannot keep you safe from that.

  Valerius did not want to be kept safe by any man. Life was not safe and could not be made so. To believe otherwise was a child’s delusion and Valerius had abandoned his childhood when he abandoned his old name and his mother’s gods; he had no intention of being seduced back to any of those, however great the threat.

  Every child knew of someone who had failed in the rites of manhood, but never personally. Rumour spread from generation to generation with details of the many routes to death. Some chose badly in the place to sit and were slain by bear or lightning or sudden floods. Some met with dream-makers, living warriors who came against them to test their skill, always with orders to kill if the boy-who-would-be-man did not respond with a warrior’s speed. Some simply walked out into the night and never came back. The dreamers scoured the pathways of the dream time for their lost souls. Only rarely did they find them. Too late, it occurred to Valerius that, very badly, he did not want to lose his soul.

  Knowing that, the only clear alternative was to face the dark and all it held and he did not wish to do that either.

  He had a lifetime’s practice in ignoring those things he most wished not to see; in this, if nothing else, he was expert. Alone with a sleeping hound, with a world’s weight of stone all around him and lacking all delusion, Julius Valerius, once-Eceni, once an officer in the armies of Rome, son of two dreamers and killer of many more, sat with his knees hugged to his chest and chose not to consider what it might mean to lose his soul.

  Some time later, unthinking, he stretched his legs flat and leaned his back against a differently angled stone in the wall. Mac Calma’s last words skittered through the gap thus opened in his discipline.

  You will know when it is time. I cannot help you.

  The Elder’s voice had been distant, even then, at the start. The tunnel leading into the chamber had beckoned and Valerius had crawled along it, welcoming the dark after the too-bright fire and the scorch of mac Calma’s scrutiny.

  He had borne that same searching gaze for nine months of the Elder’s company and had come to fear it and the questions it presaged. Naively, accepting the offer of his birthright, Valerius had expected to be trained in the ways of the dreamers. Instead, with Bellos left in Efnís’ care, becoming more able in body if not yet in sight, Valerius had found himself talking back through the convolutions of his own past with Luain mac Calma guiding the path. Through nine months of nights, he had revisited the false peace of the smith’s bothy in Hibernia, marched with Caradoc through Rome, trained with Corvus—and loved and been loved by him—in Camulodunum, in Germany, in Gaul.

  Drained of adult love, he had walked back through time to childhood; had nursed Hail to life, helped at the birth of a dun filly, ridden his father’s battle horse and the red Thessalian cavalry mare in the homelands of the Eceni and once, gloriously, defeated Amminios, brother to Caradoc, in a game of Warrior’s Dance with a slave boy’s life as the prize.

  Like running water, the questions had worn at him, probing the cracks in his self-possession until, three nights out of four, he had retired to bed swearing that he would leave and return to Hibernia alone. Each morning, he had awakened and continued, as they had both known he would, as he did now, in the hound-warmed dark with no-one to push him or hold him when he wept.

  Only mac Calma’s voice came at him through the silence, an echo of reality made real again in stone.

  I offer you your birthright.

  It was what his soul had craved through all his adult life and there was no point in denying it.

  That single promise had sustained Valerius through the ghastly crossing from Mona to Hibernia and had kept him silent, at least temporarily, when word reached them near midsummer of the long-drawn death of the governor of Britannia. Rumour said that the dreamers had killed him as they had killed his predecessor, Scapula, in revenge for a boy’s death.

  Asked, mac Calma had smiled and said, “That wasn’t us. The ancestor-dreamer killed Scapula at Airmid’s request but your sister slew this one alone, with a little help from the she-bears of the Caledonii and their unique understanding with the gods.”

  His sister, Breaca, whose name was not, and never had been, mentioned.

  Valerius’ mind slewed away from that and mac Calma did not drag him back again although it was the closest the Elder ever came to discussing the ways of gods and dreamers and the means by which one might talk to the other; that and the single cryptic sentence, given as Valerius was already closing himself off from the world.

  You will know when it is time.

  There was no time; the ancestors” dreaming chamber was too dark for that. Lacking light, Valerius had lost all sense of time. Lacking time, he had lost himself, a soul trapped in its own company with his past too much alive around him; nine months of talking had made it so.

  Fighting a rising panic, he tried to take refuge in the present, discovering too late that there was no longer anything to hold him but the slow, safe breath of a hound and the endless echo of mac Calma’s voice speaking riddles for which he had no answers.

  You will know when it is time.

  Time to do what?

  I offer you your birthright…

  And I accept. Only tell me what I must do.

  I cannot help you.

  Who else if not you?

  Valerius would have wept, had there been any point. Even in the despair of adult dreaming, he had never imagined failure of this magnitude. The boy who was Bán had dreamed of his long-nights, safe in the care of his mother, who would
not let him fail. Now, he was failing and could do nothing about it.

  You will know.

  He knew nothing, and had no means to find out. In despair, he turned sideways and lay down, squirming until his back was safe in the curve of the hound and the weight of its breath guarded his neck. Lying like that, as he had lain in childhood, Julius Valerius closed his eyes and sought the freedom of sleep.

  Which gods did you petition?

  “I have no gods.”

  His own voice woke him, too loud for the dark. Mac Calma’s question drifted ahead, as if recently asked.

  The vengeful gods laughed and made Bellos blind again, slaying a foal as their own blood-price. Mithras walked on fire and water and the blood of a slain bull filled the ancestors’ chamber and washed away with the tide.

  “You have too many gods. You can’t keep them all. Which do you choose?”

  The voice was his own, brought outside himself. It came out of the dry air and the drier stone and tapped at his bones.

  Half a dozen answers crowded for space. If he had been in company—if it were mac Calma, or Theophilus, or Corvus who asked such a question—Valerius would have picked the response that kept them safely distant. In their absence, he stared at the dark and waited for the clamour inside to die away. He did not intend to play games with a mind shaken loose of itself. Too much of his life had been given to ghosts and half-dreams forged in pain and isolation. He craved a long-nights that was real, or none at all.

  When there was silence, and Valerius was sure of himself, he said, clearly, “Go away.”

  The dark fell silent. Time moved on and he was given his wish; the air did not speak again. The waiting lay on him like a mountain.

  Light-headed, he rolled over and sat up. The hound roused with him, slowly. They had shared sleep together and the beast’s size and presence were no longer a threat. It was free to leave, where Valerius was not. That it chose to stay was a gift and accepted as such. It stood and stretched in the cramped space and turned and came to lie with its chin on his thigh, as Hail had lain in the joy-filled days of their youth.