by Manda Scott
CHAPTER 21
THE HOUND FROM THE ANCESTORS’ MOUND ACCOMPANIED Valerius on the boat over from Hibernia to Mona and the ferry journey from Mona to the mainland, watching as he retched bile and the last of his old meal onto the deck. It travelled with him as he trekked along the high mountain paths south and a little east and only abandoned him again as he passed the vast, sprawling fortress of the XXth legion and reached the foot of the track that led up to Mithras’ cave. He missed its company, but the beast seemed so clearly bound to Nemain that he could not expect it to follow him into another god’s demesne.
Of necessity, his progress up to the cave was excruciatingly slow. The followers of the bull-slayer did not deal kindly with those who profaned their places of worship and Valerius was no longer an injured officer, ranked as Lion before the god, trekking up with his Father’s permission to sanctify his soul before battle. The route up had never been easy, but this time each step must be tested before it was taken, each yard forward checked for guards or trackers or youthful initiates, who might choose to spend a night out on the mountain, eager to prove their worth in the capture of an apostate.
At each step, Valerius sought to keep open the god-space that Nemain had made in his soul. She had not asked him to abandon his service to Mithras—he could not imagine her doing so—but, having laid bare his self in her presence, it seemed impossible now that he could serve also the soldiers’ god of the legions whose worship was offered only to the best, to the sharpest, to those most dedicated to Rome and empire.
Valerius came on the god’s place in the greyness of dawn and at first did not see what it had become. On his last and only visit, on the eve of Caradoc’s defeat, the entrance to Mithras’ cave had been an unmarked cleft in a rock face at the side of a waterfall, easily missed but for the offerings of honey and corn and small pieces of gold placed with care on finger-wide ledges around the opening.
Now, four years on, a Father who wished to leave his mark most visibly had ordered white lime painted in a band a foot wide around the opening so that the black scar of the cave’s mouth shouted down into the valley and anyone, given to the god or not, would know where he resided.
Valerius would not have done this, nor, he thought, would the grey-robed tribune who had been the Father of the order in his time. That man had cared more for the old way of things and would not have needed to scream his presence to the world. Valerius wondered if the new governor were branded for the bull-slayer: the act had the mark of a man who fed on self-publicity and the adulation of others as Suetonius Paulinus was said to do.
On this morning, of all mornings, the effect was not quite as had been intended. The wind had risen and was playing with the waterfall so that the white-painted mouth was blurred by the whiter spray and Valerius saw the full horror only when he stood directly before it.
It was crushingly ugly. Brash offerings had been left, to match the paint. A gold chain hung from a peg driven into the rock; a flagon of wine lay unbroken, its wax seal stamped with Claudius’ mark to demonstrate the age and worth of the vintage; a single ocean pearl threaded on gold wire dangled from the hazel that drooped over the waterfall, a drop of shining milk in the wet. Only the last of these added to the sanctity of the place. Valerius felt an ache in his back teeth that was the first whisper of the god’s discomfort.
He did not want to enter the presence of one he had served tainted with the gloss of false offerings. Leaving his pack, he tracked back one hundred paces and waited, watching. When he was certain that neither men nor animals had tracked his climb up, he stripped and eased his way gingerly down over wet rocks to the pool at the foot of the waterfall.
Water thundered around him, spray-bright and savage. A decade’s service in the west had not dimmed his awe at the sheer, mind-numbing power of a river falling over a cliff. Like a child, he spread his arms and let the water sting his face and chest, flaying him awake. The brand at his sternum tingled lightly but no more; the time was long gone when the pain of it reminded him of his duty.
More alert, he stepped off the last rock into the water. The cold did not steal his breath as it had in the river outside the dreamers’ chamber; he could think this time, and not lose himself. Grateful for that, he ducked his head under and let the raw current sweep the rest of his skin clean.
With cleanliness came a fresh awareness. He had not been welcome on Mona and the pain of that stayed with him. It did not leave now, but he was alive in spite of it, free to drink in the sharp air and the crystalline water, the piercing sky and the cry of the yearling buzzard that hunted early, ragged from winter and too hungry to wait until full light. That pain touched him, but pleasantly. Valerius found he could see forward to a time when it would be assuaged by food and rest and the play of high winds. That surprised him; he had not known that Nemain’s soul-opening would allow him to see forward, even for an impatient bird. He rediscovered her presence as a gift and bathed himself in it as he bathed in the water.
Later, dry and clothed, he gathered the gold and the wine from the cave’s mouth and cast them into the river. It was no longer his duty, but he wished Mithras no ill and this was a service he was uniquely placed to offer. Any land-sourced water was sacred to Nemain, but she had always been the gateway to the other gods; she could devour such things without harm as the bull-slayer could not. The ache in his teeth died away as the pool took the last dazzling chain. He left the pearl. It had been hung in the hazel with different intent by one who understood the gods’ love of beauty.
There was nothing left, then, to keep Valerius from entering the cave. Holding his mind open, he lit one of the tallow candles he had brought and squeezed in through the white-painted mouth, stealing himself for the belly-crawl in darkness through an ever narrowing tunnel that would bring him into the presence of the god.
That much had not changed. As he had before, he reached the bend in the tunnel where the floor sloped steeply and the only way forward was with his arms outstretched in front and his body bent into the rock. For long moments, it seemed impossible to go either forward or back and he had to crush the urge to panic. When he reached it, the opening out into the cave came as a blessed relief that was as much memory as reality.
He was not the man he had been; his appreciation of this place was greater than before. The ancestor-dreamers of the Hibernians had built of stone the dreaming chamber in which Valerius had passed his long-nights and had made it lightless. Here, the gods, without the help of any dreamers, had built a vaulting cavern within a mountain so high that it scraped the clouds and they had set within it a lake and a lacing of water that, when touched by a candle’s flame, had been the most heartbreakingly beautiful thing Valerius had ever seen.
The shock of it had brought him to Mithras before. He hoped it would do so again. By feel, he lit the second of his three candles and set it on the rock, then shut his eyes and waited a moment before looking out to where the lake had been, and the dripping jewels of water that had quivered from the ceiling like the gold-wrought tears of the god.
Just too late, the ache in his teeth returned, sharply, but he was too full of expectation to make sense of it.
He should have known; a man who will paint white the mouth of a cave will put his stamp also on that which is most sacred within it. Iron ringed the lake; a barrier of staves of the kind the legions might place on the margins of their night camps except that these rods were of iron, not wood, and they had been fired and drawn and hand-beaten and stamped at the ends with the mark of the raven, exactly as it was branded on Valerius’ chest, and whereas the legionaries could place their staves with a single stamp into the ground, here, men with chisels and mortar had worked for days to root them into the rock that was the cave’s floor.
It was sacrilege, perpetrated in the name of the god, and Valerius’ every sense screamed at the sight of it. He turned and found at the back of the cave an altar of marble and the small part of him that could think tried to imagine how it had been brought in
through the tunnel. The rest of him studied the carvings around it and the wrought gold and the painted icons and saw them, too, as sacrilege.
In disgust, he said, “Do they not know you?”
They think they do. Are you any different?
Valerius turned back to the water far more slowly than he had turned away. Nemain had not appeared to him in a vision, nor spoken aloud so that her voice rolled off the water-jewelled rock, shaking him where he stood.
Mithras did both. The god was not kneeling in fire as he had before. He had no bull, alive or dead, at his feet, but the hound that was shown with him always in the carvings and the friezes of the cellars beneath each Roman fortress stood at his heel, its head level with his thigh. In the images, it was small and lop-eared; a smooth-haired southern sight-hound, from the hot deserts of Mithras’ birth.
In the cave of the god in the mountains of Britannia, the hound was tall with prick ears and a harsh, broken coat and the spatterings of white stood out on its mane so that it could have stood recently in snow. It was the hound of the ancestors’ dreaming chamber, that had departed at the foot of the god’s mountain, and it was Hail, who was dead and had been given to Briga. It should not have come also in the company of any foreign god, much less one so closely entwined with the legions.
Valerius opened his mouth and closed it again. Nemain watched and offered no help.
Amused, Mithras said, I ask you again. Do you know me, Julius Valerius, smith of Hibernia?
Valerius found his voice, which surprised him. “I do not presume so much. I never have.”
And yet you clear the false offerings from the mouth of my cave and feel grief at the entrapment of my lake.
“I would not see you in pain.”
So then you understand that much. I will ask differently. Do you know me, Bán of the Eceni?
“No.”
Valerius spoke without thinking, from the twisting place in his chest where old pain was still rooted. Four years before, that would have been enough. Today, now, from the openness into which Nemain had drawn him, he said, “As Julius Valerius, decurion of the cavalry and servant of the emperor, I could have come to know you. As Bán, I can only be given to Nemain.”
But you are not Bán. You do not answer to that name, nor think of yourself so in your dreams. I ask you again: as Valerius, whom do you serve?
One does not speak twice without due thought in the presence of a god. Valerius stood in the centre of the cavern and watched the light of his candle bleed through the gaps between the iron staves. Once, it would have been light enough to set fire to the lake and bring the place alive, but no longer. The god stood on mute water while channels of withered flame barely touched his feet. Valerius let his mind stretch out to meet them, and reached for an answer.
For three years on Hibernia, he had lived only as Valerius, and had believed himself godless. Now, knowing differently, he had not found who he might be, except that he was not yet Bán of the Eceni, nor was he any longer Julius Valerius, citizen of Rome and decurion of the Thracian cavalry.
At the feet of the bull-god, the hound dipped its head and drank of the firelight. Here, in this place, its pelt was clotted at the neck where the death wound had bled out. It snuffed the air and pricked its ears and trotted forward, leaping the iron staves as if they were sticks laid flat on the ground. Reaching Valerius, it nudged its nose into his lax hand and, as he had in the ancestors’ chamber, he felt the warmth and wetness of it as if it were real.
In the presence of the gods, nothing happens by accident. Valerius knelt as Mithras had once knelt and ruffled the dream-hound’s ears. Looking out over the water, he said, “Is this my hound, or yours?”
If you are given to me, what is mine is yours.
If … The word spanned the air between man and god, vibrantly, opening doors that Valerius had long believed closed.
If… The god walked forward along avenues of fire. His face was that of a youth, his eyes eternally old. His hair was the colour of the morning sun and in his smile he held the beauty, and the savage power, of every dawn there had ever been. No man could meet him without love, nor fail to know regret at his departing.
Valerius, who had served him for fifteen years without such a meeting and so without love, felt himself crushed beneath a mountain’s weight of loss.
In anguish, he said, “I cannot be what I was. I cannot go back.”
Would you wish to?
“No. I have been given my birthright. Who I am now is the truth.” Desperate, Valerius searched for Nemain and found her and nothing changed but that his soul came into balance and his confusion was not unheard. She did not force a choice, as Mithras had not. Even so, he could see no way that a man could serve two such disparate gods and hold himself intact.
A flame wavered on the flat mirror of the water. The god was close enough to touch. Quietly, he said, Who are you now, Valerius, walker between the worlds? Julius Valerius was as fully of Rome as Bán was of the Eceni and neither will easily be laid to rest, however much you may seek to do so. Must you now renounce one to keep faith with the other? The choice is yours. No god can make it for you.
Valerius had not come seeking choice, but an ending. For too long, he said nothing, staring at the iron staves and the stuttering candle. Then the quality of the silence changed and when he looked again the god was flowing into the fire and the fire into the water.
The loss was devastating. Abandoned, he sank to his knees and wept. Scalding tears melted tracks on his cheeks. He wanted urgently to swear fealty, all choices made, and could not; his voice was no longer at his command.
The coarse-pelted hound turned towards the lake and whined once, softly, then turned back and nudged Valerius’ hand.
Through the echoing chamber of the cave, Mithras’ voice reached him, softly. Seek who it is that you have become, walker between the worlds. If you can find that, the peace of the gods will be open to you, and not only as you walk in the light of Nemain’s moon.
Valerius was alone, kneeling on the rock of the chamber’s floor, shaking as badly as he ever did on ocean crossings. The hound made him sit up, made him stand, shoved at his leg so that he must brace against it or fall over. He wanted to be sick and did not dare so defile the god’s cavern, however badly it had already been defiled.
The thought of that moved him. He had brought with him no tools, but he believed it possible that even empty-handed he could undo the worst of what men with tools had done.
The iron staves set around the lake were easiest to remove; the holes in which they were set were not deep, the mortar already rotten in the damp air. He raised them, one at a time, and stacked them against the wall near the tunnel that led to the outer world.
The altar was more complicated. It was not ugly; in the right place it might have been beautiful, but this was not the right place. Examining it, Valerius found that it had been made in sections, and so understood how it had been brought through the tunnel. The flat marble of the top lifted clear and the four walls were held by wooden pegs within.
It took some effort to prise it apart, but he had time and an energy that must be vented on something. The gold and frippery around the edges were easily removed. His only question was where to dispose of the pieces. He could not hurl them into the lake—of all the water in the world, this was not Nemain’s—nor could he drag the marble out through the tunnel alone and without ropes or rollers.
The candles were nearly used up. He lit the third from the stump of the second and watched the two flames wind round each other in the loose air. They tipped to his left, towards the tunnel’s mouth through which he had come, blown by a draught that came from the opposite side of the cavern. Valerius turned on one heel and stared at the wall of dark rock.
“So now, do you think I can go into the other cavern? The gods would not let me before.”
Valerius spoke to the hound, which gave no answer, but it did not hold him back when he lifted a bundle of iron stakes under one
arm and searched for the mouth of the cave-within-cave that he had found once before. This opening had not been outlined in white lime. It was unlikely that the engineers with their drills and mortar had not seen it, but, like Valerius on his last visit, they may have been warned away by a power too great to be ignored.
The entrance looked no more inviting than it had done before. The candle drifted and spat and cast more shadows than it did light. Valerius squeezed himself sideways and slid his shoulders into the cleft that led to the new cave—and waited.
No voice came to stop him. The still place in his soul held no warning.
A greater draught blew out the candle.
Valerius was not afraid of the dark. He reminded himself of this fact three times as he propped the iron staves against the wall of the inner cavern and felt his way back whence he had come. His years in the legions had made him methodical if nothing else; the iron staves were stacked together in a row and he arranged the pieces of the altar in size order alongside. Carrying them into the inner cave was slow work, made slower by the lack of light and the need to feel his way, but Valerius became faster with practice so that the gold and icons of the altar pieces were easily taken further into the inner cavern and laid on ledges that he had come to know by touch.
He laid the last one in place and stood still, snuffing the air as a deer might do, scenting danger. He felt no threat, only a sense of great age and a watchfulness that was not his and a fainter touch of something that might have been a greeting, or at least an acknowledgement of his presence. There was a dryness to it that did not match the damp of the cavern but made him think of newly shed leaves before the rains of winter pulp them, or a snake skin, found soon after shedding.
He walked a little way forward, beyond the furthest point of his exploration, and let the draught lift the hair from his forehead.
“Thank you,” he said. “I leave these in your care. They are not wrong in themselves, only in the wrong place for the wrong reasons. One day they may be right.”
