by Manda Scott
He had grown in height and breadth, but so much more in other ways. His grip was solid and knew where he ended and she began, respecting them both. Breaca felt a warmth on her neck that she thought was his breath and then realized wasn’t.
He had not wept for Eneit as he did for her now.
Clouds had smeared over the stars by the time they stood apart. Speaking was hard. Breaca said, “There is too much to say and we can’t talk now. Do you know why I’m here?”
“Of course.” He grinned; a year with the Caledonii had not dimmed his delight in his own achievements, nor should it have done. He said, “I’ve been here three days. The slavers are due to meet one of Berikos’ men—a lame warrior of the Coritani who fought against you before the Romans came. He has the marks of the fire lizard burned on his arms as proof that he has both killed and taken wounds in war. He raps a knife against the hazel stump as a sign he is here. The noise it makes carries further than you’d think and there’s always one of the Latins listening. When they hear it, the big one with the leaping fish as his shoulder brooch comes to meet him.”
“The Coritani lizard-man left the clearing before it became dark. If he hasn’t been here, it’s because he is waiting for someone.”
“You, perhaps? Did he know you were watching him?”
“Possibly.” Breaca spun on one heel, listening to a forest at night. Distantly, men in mail moved heavily between the trees. A faint light glowed that was more than the fires and less than the moon. She asked, “Do the two slavers with mail stay close to the fish-leaper?”
Cunomar had heard what she heard. He knelt and retrieved the bear-hilted knife. “Only one of them comes this far,” he said. “The other waits nearer the fair, to keep away passers-by.”
“In case they discover that the Coritani have taken to selling human lives for gold and a fish-badged Latin buys them.” Breaca drew her own knife. “They’re on their way. Bringing torches, no less, which should blind them to anything beyond their reach. Good. We should move …”
They stepped back and back and the space around them was black compared to the fire of the resin torches the slavers brought with them and any noise they made was lost in the clatter of men not trained to stalk in a forest at night.
The Latin trader came first, with his mail-clad ex-legionary bodyguard. The jewelled fish on his tunic leaped bright under the flame. The lizard-marked Coritani warrior was slower to arrive and came without light, treading silently; he had been a hunter once, of men as well as animals. He spoke Latin with a Gaulish accent and was answered in kind with passwords that both sides knew. If he was aware he was being watched, he hid it well.
Both men were used to dealing and gave no concessions; the trading passed smoothly, as if they were, indeed, exchanging a war-trained colt for a wagon of hides. Breaca listened less to the detail than the tone. It was not a new venture, nor a first meeting, simply the latest in a series of tightly made bargains.
Beside her, Cunomar knelt on one knee with one hand on his spear, his whole attention focused on the meeting. He shivered all over, lightly, in the way Stone did in the hunt, transfixed by a hare. She had seen the same in Ardacos before battle when the she-bear filled him most. She wanted very badly for him to see Cunomar now.
The bargain was struck: a dozen youths nearing adult age were to be delivered to the sea port just south of Camulodunum in exchange for the payment of thirty flagons of good wine, marked with the emperor’s stamp, three pitchers of olives and an unspecified amount of gold that changed hands on the spot, as surety. The lizard-man counted the coins and tied them in his belt-pouch. They chimed gently against his thigh.
At a signal from the fish-badged Latin, the men parted. The slaver and his bodyguard took their torches and threaded back along the paths to their fire. The lizard-marked Coritani waited with his back to the hazel stump. He had been a good warrior in his day, the lizard marks said so; he must know he was being watched. He glanced around, warily, but without fear.
Breaca felt a tap on her shoulder. So quietly that his voice came into her mind as had the spear-song, Cunomar said, “We can’t kill the Latins, their deaths would bring down reprisals on everyone at the fair, but Rome will not care if a lizard-warrior of the Coritani dies to a bear in the forest.”
“Or if he falls into the river and drowns?” Breaca had thought the same. A prickle of almost-danger thrilled her skin. The Coritani warrior could feel it as well as she. He had drawn his knife and was stepping back into the deeper forest, keeping trees at his back for safety.
Breaca said, “There may be more of them waiting. He would be a fool to have come alone.”
Cunomar flashed her a shattering smile. The moon had risen enough to fire the gold of his hair. His eyes were amber and alive with the night. He said, “I don’t think he’s a fool. At least three other warriors wait beyond the margins of the trees. But we are the Boudica and her son, who is the bear. For us, four men are as nothing.” His voice was rich and deep and full of promise. “Will you hunt with me, Boudica, bringer of victory?”
For five years in the mountains of the west, Breaca had hunted alone at either end of the battle season.
She had done so out of choice when there were others who could have accompanied her and shared the risk and the elation of each kill. At different times and in different ways, Ardacos and Cygfa, Gwyddhien and Braint had all offered to join her on the crossing to the mainland and she had turned them down with platitudes, never saying that she cherished each year the months of solitude, the freedom of self-reliance after the necessary dependencies of battle.
Through the years, she had thought that she could have shared the experience only with Caradoc, and the loss of that had been yet another layer in her grief for the greater loss, wearing thin over the years until it became simply another part of her soul.
On the night she hunted the Coritani lizard-warriors in the company of Cunomar, her son, Breaca learned for the first time what it might have been to hunt with his father. The joy of it matched the pain, and both were outmatched by the pure, fluent beauty of the hunting.
The enemy were five; the fire-marked Coritani slave seller and the two men and two women of his honour guard. All were lizard-marked for kills and wounds in battle, and they were not as nothing.
Starlight and the cloud-veiled moon made the forest a place of shifting greys and blacks. The first of the enemy, who had taken gold from the slave traders, backed away from the meeting place knife-handed, showing a flash of iron where sense would have kept him still.
Knife-song joined the spear-songs in the whisperings of a forest at night. Cunomar tapped two fingers across his own forearm and angled his head west. They were on Eceni territory, in Eceni hunting lands; he knew the forest as Breaca did, and the Coritani lizard-fighters did not. Breaca nodded and made her own signal, pressing the heel of her hand towards the earth.
They separated, mother and son, folding into a forest that welcomed them, and when they met again they were between the Coritani slave seller and the four warriors of his honour guard.
They did not kill him then; the honour of the hunt demanded that he be last. Breaca lifted a stone the size of her fist and sent it rolling to her left. Leaf litter and small branches creaked in its path. The slave seller froze and twisted and pushed himself into the bole of a beech tree and the whipping undergrowth around it. Ahead, two of his honour guard separated, and were no longer acting as shields, one for the other.
There was no room to use her sling and no need yet for a knife. Breaca broke the neck of the one who took her path, stepping out of the dark to cup a chin and force it sharply up and back and to the side; so much easier to kill an enemy than it had once seemed to kill Graine, even in mercy. Only as she lowered the body did she find that it was a woman, and was sorry.
Cunomar joined her. He had shed his jerkin. The night made armour of his bear-scars, that ran in long crosswise ribs from shoulders to waist. His knife was blackly wet. The song of it
had deepened to the one she had known in the forge, where it would stay now, until broken.
He knelt, and on the body of a woman whom Rome had turned to slaver cut marks that could make it seem as if she were a bear-kill. The night became loud with the stench of fresh blood and a stomach laid open.
The wood held its breath, so that even the hunting weasels became briefly still. Ahead, a deer barked in darkness and another behind. No deer barked at night. They were known now: hunters and hunted; two against three.
Cunomar rose, and stood at his mother’s shoulder. He no longer grinned for her; his face was closed, a still mask of focused intent. They were beyond speech, or the arm-tap signals of the she-bears; for the duration of that hunt, the Boudica and her son became one, two blades of a single weapon. His eyes were her eyes, her thoughts his, from the shame of killing a woman of the tribes to pride in the perfection of the kill. His almost-death was almost hers.
Passing along the edge of a tiny clearing lined with mossed stones and plates of moonlit fungus, Breaca scented blood and heard the grunting exhalation of one fatally struck. Only the prescience of a thousand such hunts made her turn away from the flash of iron that might have been Cunomar’s death, or his kill, so that she stepped instead into the path of the warrior who would have slain her and was able to duck and sidestep and make her own strike. His blade carved a scallop from her shoulder, near the scars of the old-festered spear wound. Her blade caught him messily on the cheek, glancing into his eye.
He was good. A lesser man would have screamed and given way to the pain and so lost his life. This one switched his blade to his left hand and circled her, even as the blood flooded the right side of his face.
Aloud, because it no longer mattered to be silent, Breaca said, “If such as we fought together and not apart, Rome would have been banished long since.”
He laughed at her, breathlessly. “They are too many … Rome will win and we their allies … better that than slain foe.”
The stones of the clearing hid a small spring. She drove him towards it, using the advantage of two eyes against one. When he stepped on the edge of it and lost his balance, she killed him, stepping in past his knife hand to thrust into his chest. He died choking on blood and the noise no longer mattered.
Cunomar was backed against a tree with cuts across his chest. On a path running away from the clearing, he faced two, openly: the first of the slave sellers with the lizard brands laced up the full length of his forearms and another, older and less marked, who wore his hair raised high in a knot at the back with hawk feathers dangling from it.
The older was the wiser. Hearing Breaca’s kill, he turned to put his back to his shield-mate, so that those two, also, became welded to one.
Breaca stepped back into the night. The height of the moon showed her son braced against the fine bark of an elm with his knife held cleanly in front, as focused in the face of death as he had been in the first moments of the hunt. The elders of the Caledonii had schooled him well, but they had not hunted for five years amongst the enemy as the Boudica had done, where to live took more than the facing of death without fear.
To live now, to enable her son to live, required silence, and unyielding nerve and a lifetime’s understanding of men.
Any man knows when eyes are on him. A warrior awaiting attack knows it soonest and most reliably. Breaca did not, then, watch the elder of the two warriors, the one with the strong nose and the high cheeks and the red hawk’s feathers in his bound-up hair, but exclusively and intently his companion, who faced Cunomar’s knife and could not shift his attention without risking death.
A hawthorn thicket scratched her back. Above, damp branches dripped the aftermath of rain. Undergrowth gave way before her and the forest’s floor yielded beneath each measure of her feet as, slowly, so slowly, Breaca came up alongside the two back-joined Coritani warriors.
An eternity passed amid the rising scents of a damp woodland and then only branches separated her from them. They were two heads, two pale ears with hair bound up behind them, two necks left vulnerable because no warrior of the tribes wore a helmet or neck armour when hunting.
Moss sprang underfoot. A leaf stroked her cheek. The Coritani slave seller who would trade her children for Roman gold felt the weight of her attention.
Harshly, he said, “Watch to your right!” and the warrior of the red hawk did so, and swore, violently. The Boudica was less than an arm’s reach away, a blood-splashed face framed by branches, when he had thought that same dense woodland was his protection.
He was fast, but she had come at his right, and a little behind, which is hardest to strike for a right-handed man unless he can reverse his blade in time. He tried, and in the trying lost the chance to drop and roll, which might have saved him. Still, he ducked sideways and so the strike which was aimed at his chest caught him instead across the abdomen, messily. Dying, he could still attack and did so, catching her across the calf before she reversed her knife and struck his temple with the hilt and then laid open his throat to the backbone.
The lizard-branded slave seller died more swiftly, caught between the Boudica and her son. Breaca caught the man’s knife arm from behind and Cunomar struck at his chest and then his throat so that the body she held became rigid and then lax and she could lower it to the ground.
She took a breath and then another and chose not to watch the swift departure of souls, but instead to watch Cunomar, who took one deep breath and then sank to his knees and was sick.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s worse to feel nothing.” She held his shoulders and waited while another wave of nausea rocked him. He was shaking, as he had been before, from the exertion and the intent and the nearness of death. From the first kill to the last had been less time than it took to drink a beaker of ale, and had felt a lifetime. She said, “You have been in battle before, but never as a warrior. Do you know the difference now?”
“Gods, yes.” He knelt on all fours and spat, taking a handful of leaves to wipe his mouth. “I thought the bear-kill was hardest, but it’s not like killing a warrior, alone and … unprotected. The she-bears spent so long protecting me when we fought in the west. I didn’t know …”
He rocked back on his heels. He was filthy; leaf litter smeared his face and blood ran freely from the cuts on his chest. He looked down at himself, in shock.
Breaca said, “They’ll hurt later. A lot. Airmid has a salve that will help keep them from festering, but very little helps the pain.” She let go of his shoulders and sat down away from the bodies of the two Coritani warriors. “I’m sure the she-bears have salves the same.”
Cunomar picked more leaf litter and cleaned the blood from his chest. “Are you sending me back?”
“No, of course not. You are a man now. I have no power to send you anywhere, and I would not wish you to leave now when you have barely returned. But still, you should consider it. The steading is no different from when you left. I have not yet raised a war host, only begun the arming of those who might join me one day. We may yet all die to Rome, or find ourselves taken by these …” She nudged the dead slave seller with her toe. “The gods have let us meet, you and I, for which I am more grateful than I can say. I would welcome each day your light in my life, but you’ve tasted true freedom and grown through it; are you certain you want to live again under the yoke of Rome?”
Cunomar had stopped shaking. He sat back against the tree that had been his protection earlier. Lacing his hands behind his head, he looked up at the stars. “The elders of the Caledonii have made me a bear-warrior. If I wish, I can go back to them, I can dance with the she-bear in the autumn and perhaps become one of their warrior-dreamers. I can fight their small battles against small tribes, and the Belgic seafarers who land on their coast and take their women. Or I could come home and live among the Eceni, and starve when they starve and fight with the Boudica when the time comes to fight.” He unhooked his hands and wiped another smear of blood from hi
s chest. “What did Eneit say before he died?”
“That he loved you, which you knew, and that he would wait for you in the lands beyond life. That you were to find the courage to live on from that day—which you have done. And he said to remember his name, which means “spirit,” and to give it to your first-born son.”
He was silent a while. The bodies of the slain warriors cooled and the blood ceased to leak from their death wounds. Cunomar reached forward and stripped the hawk feathers from the high-tied hair of the older man.
“We should make the bear-marks on their bodies and give them to the river,” he said, absently, and then, standing, “If I am to have a son, and to name him Eneit, I would have him born and live among the Eceni, with Eceni blood in his veins.” He was smiling at Breaca, shyly, in a way that took her heart and twisted it apart. He held so much of his father, and was so uniquely himself. “If I wanted to come home, would you have me?”
Before, he had been the one to make the first move. Now, Breaca pushed herself to standing, and found that the cut in her leg had stiffened and made her lame. He met her partway and they embraced this time as adults, as warriors who have staked their lives on each other’s skill, as mother to her first-born son, with all that entails, as the Boudica to the son of Caradoc, who had left a child and come home more than she had ever hoped he could be.
His welcoming arms enfolded her. She pressed her head to his shoulders and smelled his skin, as she had when he was first born and never since. She looked into his eyes, which were level with hers and waited calmly, as the bear-dreamers of the Caledonii had taught him.
“My world would be broken without you,” she said, and meant it and then, because tonight all things were possible, “If we had five hundred like you, we could rekindle the heart of the Eceni. Even fifty would be a beginning. Will you journey with me through the summer and see if we can raise enough to make your honour guard?”
