by Manda Scott
A second circle of gathered firewood lay within the ring of trees and a third of the tents and single-draped hides of the traders made a patchwork in the growing dawn. These, too, sent the hollering of traders inwards and upwards, so that the crows took umbrage and deserted the forest and even the redbreasts, who would have sat around the fires for crumbs, departed.
Within these three rings were gathered traders in their many hundreds, if not the thousands there had once been and that the site was built to hold. The Eceni had travelled in ones or twos from each steading across the territories to sell the produce of a winter’s work; the Gauls and Batavians and Iberians and Mauritanians and Latins and Romans had travelled up in their hired wagons from the sea ports on the great river with the sole aim of taking as much as they could in exchange for as little as possible of their ocean-travelled goods.
This fact was understood between them; it fired the passion of the trading. Always, the first days were spent in setting impossible targets and the next two in whittling down what was offered to what was expected and reaching ever closer to what might be accepted.
The site of the horse fair was less than half a morning’s ride from ’Tagos’ steading, but Breaca had arrived late, when all the trading positions were set. Leading her pack horses through the crowd, she made two circuits of the wide, open clearing before she found an opening that suited her needs. There she laid out the bay horse hide that set off her metalwork to best effect and set about unwrapping the goods she had spent all winter creating.
“Have you seen the slavers yet: the ones Theophilus told you of?”
Graine asked it, throwing herself down on the damp grass behind the horse hide. She was picking daisies and buttercups and weaving them into a torc for Stone, who lay close to her side. Through the winter, with Cunomar gone, Breaca had sharpened the hound’s training so that, more than ever, he had become Graine’s protector. Her daughter had grown recently, becoming more young woman than precocious child, but the hound still stood almost to her shoulder, so that she could reach over him and lean her weight on his back. Like that, they had explored the beginnings of the fair together.
It had been interesting to watch: Stone had been taught that anyone not introduced by Graine as a friend was a possible enemy and there were a lot of those at the fair. However foreign the gathered traders might have been, however strange their language or dress, every man and woman among them recognized the sight of a hound trained to attack. Steadily, while stalls were set out and the first frantic bargains begun, Graine had traversed the chaos in a halo of emptiness, knots of bartering adults split apart by her progress re-forming after she passed.
She had walked straight to her mother’s stall, which was touching, but not ideal; Breaca did not want traders to stay away from her stock of knives and spear-heads, and even bearing his own king-torc of buttercups, Stone did not inspire anyone to approach.
Breaca sat down and ruffled his neck. To Graine, she said, “I think the men sitting round the fire behind you are the slavers—that’s why I’m here—but it might be good if you stayed with Ardacos. He has charge of the roasting pits. You could help him there.”
Graine frowned at the split stem of a daisy. “Or I could leave Stone with Ardacos and come back to you?” She tilted her head, like a thrush on a snail, in a way that her mother had come to recognize.
“Is there a reason you should be here with me? Have you dreamed something I should know of?”
“No, only that I want to see how you trade. You learned from Eburovic and Macha when you were my age. One day, if we clear Rome from the land, I’ll need to know.”
“And I’ve never taught you. I’m sorry. I forget sometimes what it is to be a mother.” Breaca laid out a row of seven elm-hilted skinning knives with their blades curved back at the tip. The sun pushed through the morning mist and the first watery light made mirrors of the metal so that she saw herself seven times over, too serious, too protective, too concerned to make things right. Her father had been all these things, but carefully, so that the child who became the Boudica had been given room to grow.
Moving her head, so that the mirrors became dull iron again, Breaca said, “Stone should stay close to one of us; he’ll pine else. Sit behind the hide and keep him close. If you see me doing something you don’t understand, ask me about it afterwards, not while the trade is happening.”
“Thank you.” Graine settled cheerfully on the turf a little way back from the stall. She drew a handful of grubby amulets carved in amber from her belt-pouch and began to polish one on the hem of her tunic. They were northern work, from the Caledonii or even further towards the roof of the world; neatly carved stags with men’s faces beneath the horns, or horses that would stand if you put them on their feet, or owls that would guard against the dark chills of night. Airmid must have given them to her, or Ardacos; either of those would have seen that the child needed to learn and that her mother might not have brought anything to teach her.
“If you wanted to trade those,” Breaca offered, “we could lay them out on the hide.”
It was what was expected of her and she had played her part. Graine grinned a little ruefully, as if she might have lost a bet, but won her wish instead, and arranged her pieces out beside the knives.
“Did Airmid say I wouldn’t let you stay?” asked Breaca.
“No. Ardacos did. He bet me that I’d be back at his roasting pits before the trading started.”
“What did you win?”
Graine grinned and, briefly, was the image of the elder grandmother. “A morning’s trading with you?” she said.
Their trading together lasted more than just a morning. For three days, Breaca of the Eceni, metal smith and spear maker, taught her daughter how to calculate the worth of a thing at first seeing, how to bargain in foreign languages with the brown-skinned men and women from Iberia and Gaul who brought their enamel and bars of raw iron, with bitter-eyed Latins who brought finely fashioned gold and tanned leather dyed in colours never seen in Britannia, with the northern Belgae and Germanic tribesmen who brought horses that were not as good as the ones the Eceni already rode but whose hounds were good and who wanted silver mirrors, or the elm-hilted knives with the sign of the hare on the blade, in return.
Graine was an exceptional trader. The discovery of that surprised them both. Like finding a new shield-mate in battle, Breaca felt a door closing that had been open and a sense of sudden safety she had forgotten she lacked.
She had forgotten, also, how beautiful her daughter was; in the isolation of the steading, it was easy to see her as yet another growing child, gangly with youth and always in need of a newer, longer tunic. The traders, coming on Graine unprepared, were as taken with the freshness of her features and the ocean of her eyes as with the spears and brooches and replenished supply of amber amulets on her mother’s bench.
Very quickly, Graine learned who could be won with a smile and a sideways glance at her mother that asked permission to make the trade on her own, for the first time. Each first time, the man or woman, however foreign, however different the language, knelt at the bench and made extravagant offers for a stag carved in amber, or, later, for a spear-head or a horn-handled knife. As long as Stone kept his distance, each without fail knowingly struck a poor bargain for the sake of having made Graine smile and went away glad to have done so.
By the end of three days, Breaca’s bench was empty of goods and the space behind, guarded by Stone, was littered with sacks of salt and malted barley, with ingots of beeswax and raw iron and tanned leather and tiny slabs of Belgic enamel in blue and red and yellow, with harness and bronze harness mounts and silvered mirrors that would make good gifts for the exiled Eceni dreamers, if they ever returned from Mona. At the sleeping place, guarded by Airmid, were three new hounds and a matched pair of bay yearling colts, at least one of which had the potential to sire good battle horses.
Graine, for her part, had two new belts with bronze buckles, a necklace of
raw amber strung on elk hide that was worth more than her entire supply of amulets, a skinning knife she didn’t need and a dark brindled hound bitch so close to birthing that the whelps could be seen kicking against the side of her flank.
Better than any trade, Breaca had the measure of the eight silent, watchful men who sat around the lone fire nearby.
The Latin slavers Theophilus had warned of were striking in their complacency. Of the eight, three bore short swords in the size and style of the legions and two of those wore mail shirts that might turn a thrown spear at the end of its flight.
The rest were unarmed and unshielded and if they had ventured west of the high mountains with so little protection, they would have died, one at a time, between sunset and moonrise, before it was fully dark. In the flat lands of the east, where retaliation for the death of any man under Rome’s patronage would destroy whole families, they were as safe as the legions could make them.
The slavers built their own fire as the last day of the fair grew quiet, and cooked their own food. Elsewhere, as the sun touched the western horizon, the roasting pits were opened. The mingled riches of hare and pig and deer spread out slowly in the still air so that knots of chattering men and women fell silent from west to east as food took over from tales of the days’ bargains.
Breaca’s stall was set on the easternmost margins where a drifting breeze kept the scent away. She sat with her back to the slavers and watched others work their way towards Ardacos’ fires. A slim man branded up the full length of both forearms with the lizard marks of a Coritani warrior hung back and scratched the top of his head more than even lice might have made necessary. After a while, when no-one paid him attention, he wandered to the forest edge and stood to urinate against a tree. A while after that, he stepped behind the tree and did not return.
With his departure, the eight slavers at the ill-fed fire found it necessary to finish their meal in haste. The tallest, who bore a brooch in the shape of a leaping salmon on his tunic, wiped his hands on the grass and tipped out a bag of gold to count it.
Breaca turned her back on him and reached for three bridles with iron bits that lay nearby. She handed them to Graine and, not over-loudly but clearly enough to be heard at the neighbouring fire, said, “Could you take these to Airmid? She’ll need them to tether the new filly away from the colts.”
There was no new filly. Graine opened her mouth to say so and shut it again. Her eyes grew a little wide with the effort of not looking over her shoulder at the slavers. “Should I take Stone?” she asked. “Or will you need him?”
Breaca grinned. For a few last moments, she was trading again with her daughter, speaking secretly in open hearing, and the feeling was as good as battle. “Take him with you,” she said. “I think I may have help waiting for me in the forest.”
She was not sure of that, but the songs of the spears on her selling-hide had gained a new, almost-familiar tone as the daylight died and there was a tug in her soul that was not only the promise of action.
Graine picked up the bridles, trailing the reins so the leather darkened in the evening dew. She paused a moment, chewing her lip. “You’re right, there is help,” she said. “He’s been here for four days, but he told me not to tell you. He gave me the amulets. I think he carved them himself.”
Always, Breaca’s children defeated her. She should have been glad. She was glad, only that it was lost beneath a welter of other things, less benign. She picked a small jar of honey and threw it lightly to Graine.
“Then keep this for him, as a gift from me. You can eat it together if he decides to come home with us afterwards.”
Dusk ate the sky from east to west. Breaca waited, watching the slavers, who, in turn, watched the place where the lizard-branded Coritani warrior had left the clearing. At a certain point, when the eight shapes round the fire became darker than the shadows cast by the flames, she rose and moved outwards, away from the sources of light.
The song of the spears followed her away from both the traders and the woman of the northern Eceni who had taken all eighteen of Breaca’s hare-marked spear-heads in exchange for a pair of good knives and a red fawn bitch with coarse hair and a soft blackness round her eyes. That trade had been for show and Graine had not taken part, although the bitch was a good one and would match well with Stone.
The spear-heads were of a length for hunting but the woman knew how to hear the songs of their souls and she had others who would train with her to hear them also. Quietly, without alerting those who watched, the Boudica was equipping the first ranks of her war host.
On the outskirts of the fairground, where war was prosecuted in stealth by men who measured the values of others’ lives in gold, Breaca moved through ranks of coppiced hazels where the undergrowth had been trained upwards to make withies for baskets and sheep pens. The leaf litter beneath her feet was damp from the afternoon’s rain and she made no noise.
The spear-song that had been with her all afternoon threaded through the halls of her mind, becoming louder with every step. She moved deeper into the trees, following it as a hound follows ascent until that single song alone rose over the many others as a single pure, unsullied note and she could trace it back to its source.
The spear and the one who bore it were waiting, hidden, in the darkest part of the forest. Breaca came as close as she dared then set her back against the hollowed stump of a long-dead hazel. The moon had risen, but not enough yet to cast light into the wood. She saw what she saw by starlight and that was hazy.
Breaca could have spoken first, and chose not to; too much was at stake and too much unknown. It was enough simply to let herself be seen for what she was: alone and not heavily armed. She dared not risk more.
After a moment, from her right, Cunomar said softly, “How did you know it was me? Did Graine tell you?” His voice had deepened in the thirteen long months of his absence. It was resonant now, possessed of a certainty that mirrored his father. He sounded curious, not petulant, drily amused, not defensive.
“No. Your sister keeps her secrets well. I heard the song of your new spear and recognized it from a dream I had in the early spring when I saw you kill the wounded he-bear. It was well done.” Breaca used the formal courtesy she would don in council, facing a warrior she did not fully know.
Her son tilted his head to look at her more directly. His fair hair was grey under the stars and the unrisen moon. He asked, “Have you become a dreamer since I left?”
“Not at all, although I wondered if you had done so. Sometimes the most powerful of dreamers can send their dreams to others. If it matters enough.”
This last was a question. More hung on it than either would have openly expressed. To Graine, Breaca could speak of her care and her desperate fear and how the one wove into the other, but not yet to Cunomar, perhaps not ever.
His new spear sang while he considered his answer. The sound carried with it the scent of moss and high mountains and falling water and the iron-gall of bear blood. More faintly, men spoke invocations to the gods of rock and forest in the tongue of the Caledonii. Cunomar was one of them.
In the forest of the Eceni, Breaca’s son studied his hands for a moment, then lifted his head and looked his mother directly in the eye for the first time she could remember. He was not naked as he had been in her dreams, but she could read him as if he were and did so, feeling a hope she barely dared name. He was no taller than his father had been, but broader than Caradoc, even at the height of the battle season. He wore a sleeveless tunic and a mass of white scars showed along the curves of both shoulders, as if a bear had mauled him, except that they were too evenly spaced to have been made by a bear. Lines of blue dots traced on either side confirmed it; the dreamers of the Caledonii marked their bear dancers thus, cutting into the flesh with hot knives and laying horse hair along the wound to raise the scar.
Cunomar bore her scrutiny quietly for a while, then said, “At the time of the hunt, it mattered more than anything to show you what
I had done. I didn’t know that I sent you the dream, but I prayed to Nemain and the horned god of the forest that you saw what I had done. If the gods carried the vision to you, it was in answer to my soul’s prayer with three days of fasting to give it strength. I don’t know if I could do it again. Certainly, the elders of the Caledonii did not teach me their dream ways in the year I stayed with them, only how to become a man.”
Only. She ached to embrace him and it could not come from her. Stepping away from the hazel, she loosed the knife from her belt and held it out. “I have this for you, and a hound bitch bred by Efnís’ sister which will match Stone in the hunt.”
The knife lay on her palm, dull in the dark. In daylight, a dozen different traders had tried to bargain for it. The blade was plain, single-edged, of the greatest length allowed with a slight curve at the back edge so that it could kill or skin a body with equal ease. The hilt was not ornately tooled, but cast in bronze in the shape of a hunting bear, rounded along the back so that the hand slid over it easily and the head made the pommel. Inset at the place where the bear’s heart would be, on the left only, was a piece of obsidian carved in the shape of a spear-blade. At certain angles of the firelight, it shone red, as a wound freshly made.
The stars did not light it so, but silvered it, softly. Cunomar stepped for the first time away from the tree in whose shelter he had been standing. Cautiously, almost reverently, he lifted the knife out of her hand.
“You made this for me after the dream of my hunt?”
“Yes.”
“Gods …” As a child, he had never appreciated beauty for its own sake, only for what it could give him. He breathed now as reverently as Eneit had done when he first heard the soul-song of the spear. To hear the song of a knife was much harder.
Cunomar heard it. With the care of one guarding the sacred, he knelt and laid the blade on the leaf litter. Less carefully, he rose and threw his arms around his mother.
