by Manda Scott
She had not believed the dream; no-one had. It had come early one morning, halfway through the first of the autumn’s storms. Graine had told it to Sorcha who had waited almost to noon before, at the child’s insistence, she had walked through the rain to the great-house and told whoever would listen. The first few had smiled and laid more wood on the fire and done nothing; a young child’s dreams are too unfocused to be true and no sane man would sail in the face of an autumn storm. Airmid alone had believed her and had persuaded Ardacos to take the ferry across to the mainland to search for Breaca and bring her home.
The small warrior had taken three days to find the Boudica and another half day passed before she was persuaded to abandon her stalking of foraging legionaries on the strength of a dream told by the daughter she had barely seen these last two years. The promise of a ship had swayed her, and Airmid’s word that the dream was true.
Airmid had been waiting on the jetty for their return, carrying lit torches, with the horses saddled behind. Graine waited with her, standing on her own, no longer needing to hold an adult hand for support. Breaca could not remember when that had happened; sometime in the summer perhaps.
Graine was wearing a grey cloak and a small dreamer’s thong at the brow. That, too, was new. Her ox-blood hair hung in sodden rats’ tails around her shoulders, darkened to oak in the rain. Seeing Sorcha, she had run forward to be lifted and swung in the air, squealing. Set down on the ground again, she took a step towards her mother, then, faltering, looked back to Airmid for help.
“Go on.” The dreamer had smiled quiet encouragement. “Say what you dreamed.”
The child took a breath. Slowly, measuring the words, she said, “Luain-the-heron is on the boat that’s coming. He brings our brothers with him.”
It was an easy mistake. Graine was less than a quarter year past her third birthday. Her words were good, better than they had been in the summer, but they were no more precise than her dreaming. The difference between a brother and a father was not great either in dreaming or in language.
Airmid, standing behind, had shrugged. “She’s been saying that since she first dreamed it,” she said. “I promised I’d let her tell you.”
“It’s a kind dream, thank you.” Smiling, Breaca had knelt and opened her arms. Graine came into them, shyly, as if to a stranger, and they hugged, a mess of wet wool and rain-blackened hair. Manannan, god of the sea, sent a wave to wash over the jetty and their feet. Breaca stood, lifting her daughter in her arms, and kissed the top of her head. “Thank you for coming out in the rain. If you stay here with Ardacos now, he’ll give you dry clothes and keep you warm and Airmid and Sorcha and I will ride west to the coast and see who’s on the boat. If Cunomar’s there, we’ll bring him back to you. He’ll be glad to be home, and your father with him.”
The child’s great green-grey eyes had been solemnly wide, like an owl’s. “You’re not to be angry with him,” she said. “The grandmother said so.”
Breaca could not imagine being angry. It was enough to stand on the brink of hope, like a child on the edge of a winter torrent, not daring to step forward. For nearly three years she had known that Caradoc, Cwmfen and the children were alive in Rome, but nothing more, until Luain mac Calma had read something in the flight of a heron and heard something else from a passing Greek trader and had taken a late ship for Gaul. Breaca stood now, braced against the wind, with the spray from the sea fierce on her face and hands, and felt her heart swell to bursting in her chest as the same vessel fought the swell of the waves to bring him home.
Sorcha stood with her, and Airmid. Both of them saw the ship now, and watched its progress. Sorcha alone knew how well it fared. The ferrywoman was their link with the sea and all that sailed on it.
“That’s the Sun Horse,” she said, “Segoventos’ ship. He knows this coastline as well as I do but the wind’s too strong for him to come inshore. We should take the small boat out and meet them.”
Breaca said, “Is that safe?”
Sorcha grinned. “I don’t know. It’s safer than if mac Calma tries to row the ship’s boat in to shore but that doesn’t mean we won’t drown. It’s your choice. We could wait here for the wind to die down but it could be next spring before that happens. I didn’t think you’d want to wait that long.”
It was good to hear someone who could still laugh. Airmid was silent, as she had been since they left the forests and came within sight of the sea. Her gaze rested on the western horizon far beyond the ship where the sun lowered itself to rest on the low mountains of Hibernia. Breaca laid a hand on her shoulder. When it was acknowledged, she asked, “Did you dream with Graine? Is that how you knew it was true?”
“No. Your daughter dreams alone now. But the ancestor-dreamer visited while we were riding; we passed over one of her resting places. She is bound to us now and we to her, whatever happens. She would have us both know that the threads of the serpent-brooch are weaving in the way that we asked for.”
The wind did not lessen, but it seemed as if it did. In a bubble of quiet, Breaca said, “Sorcha, thank you for your offer. We’ll take the small boat. You’re right; I don’t think I could wait until spring.”
*
Waves swamped them and the wind pushed their boat hard to the north. They rowed against both and moved at less speed than the sun in the sky. In time, sodden and shaking and sick from the swell, they came alongside the ship. Airmid jumped to catch the rope that was thrown them. Luain mac Calma raised them up, with help from Segoventos, ship’s master, merchant seaman, and spy.
Airmid went first, and then Sorcha. Breaca, who had faced death in battle more times than it was possible to count, struggled to find the courage to join them; there had been a pain in not knowing, but it was bearable. Graine’s words rushed at her, carried on the wind and the waves. You’re not to be angry with him. Only now, when it was too late for answers, did she think to ask with whom she might be angry and why. Feeling a nausea that had nothing to do with the sea, she wound the rope round her waist, lifted the free end, and held on.
The ship’s sides were steep and slick with weed. The first pull of the rope stripped the skin from her hands and wrenched her arms. Mac Calma looped the rope on a roundel and used it to winch her ever higher. She came over the edge of the deck and was hauled in by sea-strong hands. A gaggle of strangers waited to greet her, with Airmid on their margin. Gold hair, made wet by the waves, stood out amongst darker reds and browns. Scanning them too fast, Breaca searched for known faces and, slowly, they emerged: the haggard features of the children who were no longer children and had just survived four days at sea in a storm. In that first look, she saw no-one adult and only one child that she recognized.
“Cunomar?” She crouched, finding her balance on the deck, and held open her arms. As Graine had done, her son came forward stiffly, a stranger to her as she was to him. He kissed her cheek formally and held out a dagger, balancing the blade across his palms. “Father sent me with this,” he said. “If you make it into a sword, I can go into battle. When we have killed all the Romans, he can come home again.”
There was quiet, and a tension as if too many of those around her had held their breath for too long. Breaca searched the faces of the strangers again, fighting panic.
A tall young woman with corn-gold hair pushed forward from the group. “Father’s injured. He couldn’t come; the warriors wouldn’t have followed him. He sent you this, with his love—” The words spilled out, like barley poured from the hand. She held out a brooch, dulled by the sea. The two-headed serpent coiled back on itself, looking to past and to future. The spear made an angled path across it, showing the many ways to go. At its base, looped in the coils of the snake, two threads hung blackly.
Breaca stood, staring and not seeing, her mind frozen on the point of knowing. Someone—Dubornos, perhaps, if Dubornos could be so thin, and so lame—said, “Breaca? He couldn’t come. It was the right choice. He’s alive and he’ll return when he can. He’ll get wo
rd to you in the meantime. For now, there is someone else you should meet.”
The world descended into madness. The storm made black the afternoon sky and the dying sun flared beneath. Westerly winds slammed ship and sea together, so that the deck heaved and bucked and simply to stand was hard enough. To stand and to understand and to believe and not to break was impossible. Airmid was holding her, one hand firm on her wrist. Luain mac Calma stood on her other side, leaning into her shoulder to keep her upright. The man who had spoken—it was Dubornos, scarred almost beyond recognition—stepped to one side so that what he had been hiding might be exposed to the sulphurous sunlight and to Breaca’s sight.
She thought she was dreaming truly then, and that Luain mac Calma both stood at her side and lay on the deck-bed, greenly pale with sickness. Then she looked again and it was Macha, grown leaner and harder and eaten alive with an anger that soured her soul. Then she looked a third time, and it was neither of these, but the eyes that stared into hers, alight with rage and fear and a desperate, aching wish to die, were quite black, resonantly so, the colour of charcoal, or a crow’s wing at the shoulder, where the colour is most dense—
“Bán?”
A wave slammed at the ship, rocking it. Salt water sprayed her hair and her face, scouring the skin. Further out towards Hibernia, a single gull cried, a sound like a child or a lost soul, wandering. On the deck, nobody moved. Friends and strangers waited, watching the sea. In other worlds, a grandmother sighed, or laughed, or wept; they were all the same and all lost in the storm.
The man lying sheltered on the deck-bed smiled, wryly, as if at a private joke. Slowly, taking care for unseen injuries, he pushed himself onto one elbow. The move was consciously Roman; no man of the tribes would lean so. “Caradoc said the same, just like that.” He spoke in Latin and that, too, was deliberate. His eyes sought hers for the first time, and held them. A dark irony, and pity, sparked in their depths. “You are very alike. Did you want to know that?”
She was alone, deserted by everything that made the world safe. “Are you Bán?” she asked again.
“Not any longer.” The smile hung on his face, forgotten. He looked down and studied his hands. “I may have been once. More recently, I have been Julius Valerius, decurion of the first troop, First Thracian Cavalry. Now, I am no-one. If you need answers, ask mac Calma. This is his doing. I have no doubt he understands it better than you or I will ever do.”
He brings our brothers. Graine had said so, one quarter year past her third birthday and Breaca had dared to presume that a child’s uncertain dreaming could not distinguish between one love and the other. You are not to be angry with him.
Think of Bán. He is the red and the black. Trust me.
She was sick. It had been a long time coming and she had ignored it. Airmid held her, guiding her to the stern so she could lean out over the ocean and not soil the deck. Cygfa, recognizable now through the changes of age and battle and hardship, brought her rainwater and a sponge to clean her face. Breaca drank some of the water and spat it out, washing the salt and sick from her teeth. Standing, she took the bowl and emptied it over her head. The sudden deluge did not make her any wetter, that would have been impossible, but the shock brought her back to herself, cold and vividly angry.
There was no hope. There never had been; at heart, she had known it. Instead, there was a world of care and killing and the refuge of anger and a man who lay on a deck-bed wearing the uniform of a Roman cavalry officer. Not two days since, she had killed a decurion who wore its twin, but the dead man had not worn at his shoulder the badge of the red bull, mark of the Eceni ancestors, painted in living blood on grey.
When she let go of the face and the eyes of the enemy lying on the deck-bed, the red bull claimed all her attention. A pattern wove through other patterns and rose above them.
I have been Julius Valerius, decurion of the first troop, First Thracian Cavalry.
Hail is dead. The decurion of the Thracian cavalry killed him, the one who rides the pied horse.
I will unleash such vengeance…
Tightly, Breaca said, “You killed Hail.”
The vestige of her brother said, “Not exactly. But it is my fault that he died.”
Breaca had brought no sword, but her sling was knotted at her belt and the handful of stones rolled in her pouch. The moves to draw one and the other and join them grew from more than two years’ practice and a summer of certain kills.
“No.”
Luain mac Calma stopped her. The decurion—the obscene travesty of what Bán had been—would not have done. He lay still, his eyes moving from Breaca’s to the space a little to her left. When mac Calma closed his fingers on Breaca’s arm and the sling-stone fell to the deck, the not-Bán smiled weakly. “Your Elder has an unhealthy regard for my welfare. You shouldn’t let him stop you.”
It was the track of his eyes that warned her, and Airmid, standing too pale and too still, just beside. Breaca had heard Macha’s voice on the night of the ancestor-dreamer, but she had not seen her since she left the lands of the living. Turning, she saw her now, and the others gathered around: the elder grandmother and, more distantly, her father. Luain mac Calma stepped carefully past them, coming to stand between Breaca and the deck-bed. The ghosts milled around him, as dogs to a hunter. Macha was foremost.
You’re not to be angry. The grandmother said so.
Trust me.
Macha had been a grandmother, if only for a day, but always Bán had been her first love.
How does one display fury to a ghost? As if she were alive, Breaca said, “Did you speak to my daughter? Did you send Graine the dream?”
The ghost nodded, saying nothing. Moving slowly, she sat on the end of the deck-bed. Bán, her son, watched her, frozen, as a shrew watches a hunting snake. If he had loved her in life, he did so no longer. With visible effort, he drew his eyes back to the living, to Breaca. “They want me on Mona,” he said. “Neither you nor I can live with that. You should use your sling.” For the first time, he spoke in Eceni. His smile was as she remembered. Her heart was too broken for pity. She hated him no less.
Her fingers closed on another stone. Luain mac Calma did not reach for her hand, but said only, “Breaca, don’t. The gods need him alive.”
She shook her head. “Not on Mona. Not in my lifetime.”
“But he must not die. You have to believe me in this. He must live beyond today.”
“Then where? You heard him, he cannot return to Rome; he has turned his back on the legions.”
“I know. If you will not have him on Mona, you must say where else.”
Sister and brother reached the answer together, or the ghosts guided them to it. The sun spread light on the western deck. Macha stepped into it, lost in the cold amber. Luain mac Calma joined her, a tall heron from another land. A day’s sail to the west, the mountains of Hibernia rose to meet the evening.
Breaca stared at them and, turning, found her brother had seen the same. His eyes sought hers, black without end. If they carried a message, she could not read it. His lips framed the word before she spoke it so that, in the end, it seemed as if two voices sounded together.
“Hibernia,” she said. “Segoventos can take him to Hibernia. If he is ever to find peace, it will be there.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
For details of this period in the Roman occupation of Britain, we are indebted almost entirely to Tacitus. Without his précis of Scapula’s disarming of the eastern tribes and of the events surrounding the betrayal, capture and pardon of Caradoc/Caratacus, this period of history would be a white fog, obscured further by random archaeological finds. Tacitus, of course, was not writing for a modern audience but for a Rome barely fifty years beyond the events he was describing. Among his primary sources was his father-in-law Agricola, who was not present in Britannia within the period of Scapula’s governorship. Others may have given personal accounts but it is likely that a great deal of his information came from military reports
from the field. As recent experience of empires at war teaches us, battlefield reports are written with their own heavily accented spin, designed to display the invader in the best light possible and the opposition in the worst. When a general reports that the enemy fought with a ferocity exceeding everything previously encountered, even now in the twenty-first century it would be fair to assume that this is an excuse for significant losses on the side of the one writing the report, very possibly compounded by some serious tactical errors. It seems to me likely that the same imputations can be read into just such a report written in the first century for an emperor not renowned for his magnanimity, where the penalty for failure was rather more permanent than a barracking by a hostile press.
Even without the inherent bias of his primary sources, it would be naïve to believe that Tacitus himself did not add his own spin; regarding the events on the western frontier, he admits to telescoping the events of several years into a single brief narrative to make them more comprehensible and, in Rome, he grants to Caradoc a monologue of commendable literacy and brevity, loaded with implications for an audience not yet born. The challenge for the modern writer of fiction is to sift through the ancient fiction for those kernels of plausible truth and then to find from them the motivations of all those involved.
In this, other authors are constructive. Suetonius gives us an insight into the temperaments of the various Caesars and is certainly our most authoritative ancient source who may have had an understanding of Claudius. That emperor has benefited in recent years from the rather pleasant whitewash promulgated by Robert Graves and Derek Jacobi in which Gaius/Caligula’s successor emerges as a well-meaning idiot surrounded by scheming madmen. Suetonius’ account is less flattering; his Claudius is an efficient bean-counter with a heavy leaning to sadism, balanced only by an overwhelming instinct for self-preservation and a very healthy (and justified) paranoia. He was not as clearly unhinged as Caligula but his reign lasted longer and far more of his subjects, slaves and conquered enemies died in the palace and in the Circus than in the reign of any emperor before him. There seems to be some evidence that Nero, for all his pretensions, went some way to curb the excesses of public sadism instigated by his step-uncle.
