The Dawn Stag: Book Two of the Dalriada Trilogy

by Jules Watson

‘But you men ate it!’ she cried. ‘Didn’t you?’

  As they both nodded, Rhiann’s eyes slid instead to Caitlin, and came to rest on the swollen belly pressing against the fine shift, stuck to her by Eithne’s sweat. Then she raised her gaze to Caitlin’s face.

  Caitlin gasped, her hand spreading across her belly.

  Rhiann and Eithne had their moon bleeding at the same time, and it was not due for another week. ‘It’s her womb; cramping in her womb.’ Rhiann gathered Eithne’s head tenderly in her arms, stroking her brow. ‘Aedan, Didius, help me to get her into the sickbed, and bring more water!’

  All through the night the blood trickled from Eithne with the waves of the cramps, soaking the bed beneath her tiny body.

  Rhiann used everything at her disposal to stem it; tonics and suppositories of the red herb, feverfew, knapweed, cranesbill. As Eithne muttered and tossed in the poppy delirium, given for her pain, Rhiann held tight to the thought that whatever Eithne had ingested, it was not meant to kill, for Aedan and Didius stood there unharmed. It was the womb that was the target, the aim a miscarriage.

  As the hours of night slipped by, Rhiann went about her business, grateful for Caitlin’s aid, but missing Eithne’s efficient hands and ability to sense what Rhiann needed.

  Once the first guilt passed, rage had again constricted Rhiann’s chest and yet, as she put all her energy into Eithne, so the fury eventually cooled to defeat. She knew what would happen if she asked who delivered that particular broth, for the Sisters were not the only practitioners of herb lore. Rhiann had no doubt that the truth had already been lost among the shadows of the druid shrine.

  With doses of strengthening brews, and bloody meat twice a day, Rhiann gradually nursed Eithne back to health, and though she had no clear recollection of the night, the maid remained weak and fearful for many days thereafter.

  From then on, Rhiann would only accept grain or joints of meat from Aldera’s own hand, passed through Aedan, for Rhiann was forbidden from approaching the Moon Gate. They survived on their own baked bannocks and meat broth, though it wasn’t enough fresh food, and they all lost weight and grew pale.

  Only once did Rhiann meet Gelert by accident, both of them alone, yet she would not deign to speak to him. She did no more than spit deliberately at his feet and turn away, ears closed to his hissed response.

  They would all have gone mad but for Aedan’s tales, and the freedom he gave them in their minds and dreams: of far lands and cool forests and fresh sea winds. And every night, in vision, Rhiann willed Eremon’s steps to turn back towards Dunadd, and she pictured him coming closer, his boar-crest helm glittering in the sun.

  CHAPTER 17

  The harvest moon of Lugnasa grew and swelled in the sky.

  Every night, Rhiann stood outside her door, watching the fires flaring in the fields to the south, as each was cleared of grain. Sometimes if the wind was right she would hear snatches of singing, and the scent of roasting meat drifted up from the river meadow. She tried not to be hurt by the sounds of revelry. Lugnasa was when the Mother’s bounty was collected, and She must be honoured with mead, feasts and dancing, to secure Her blessings for the next year.

  Yet on the second last night before the moon ended, Lorn made a surprise visit to Rhiann’s house. After the usual stiff courtesies, in which Rhiann did not bother to get up from the hearth-stone, Lorn drew a deep, nervous breath.

  ‘We wish …’ His voice faltered, as Rhiann levered a bannock off the hot stone. Silently, she raised one eyebrow at him in query. He looked no better than when she had first seen him.

  Lorn ploughed on. ‘The people wish for Caitlin to be harvest queen this year. We will escort her and you … Ban Cré … to the procession and the blessing.’ He seemed to want to say more, then compressed his lips, and fell silent.

  Rhiann was swept with a tide of conflicting emotion. She glanced at Caitlin in the rush chair, her belly as swollen now as the grains on the stalks. Of course the people would wish her to be harvest queen – she would draw the Source to the fields with her very presence.

  And yet … Rhiann could not abide Urben ordering them about as if they were his vassals. It was Rhiann’s duty to take part in the festivities, though she had given up on that hope this year – and Urben was using them to make it seem there was nothing wrong. A proud refusal sprang to Rhiann’s lips, but then she saw the desperate hope lighting in Caitlin’s eyes, and realized how much she suffered at this imprisonment.

  She had grown so uncomfortable in this sticky heat, her face pale and sheened with sweat, her slim ankles swollen. She moved slowly, where she never had before, pausing often to catch her breath, her hand on her back. Rhiann was in constant anxiety over her, yet after all her potions and brews, fresh air and movement was the one thing Rhiann could not give and which she perhaps needed most.

  Rhiann gazed up at Lorn. ‘We will attend the rite.’

  The next night, the stubbled fields upriver to the south, in the Add valley, were golden in the torchlight, the still air thick with dust and chaff. Around the bonfire in the centre, the black shapes of dancers waited for Rhiann to conclude her blessing. The sky was the colour of heather, the perfume of the blooms gathered in the bowl of the dark hills.

  The birds had fallen silent and there was no wind, just the crackling of the fire, the solemn beat of a drum and a single flute whose notes rose and fell, echoing from the valley slopes.

  There was a stone in this field, half-buried in turf now, carved by the same Old Ones who built the tombs in the ancestor valley. The sacred spirals drawn on it told the story of the cycle of the soul, from Mother’s womb to the world and back again. Yet tonight, the spirals that Rhiann traced with ash and filled with the first mead were for the grain, which was also born in darkness and then burst into sun, before dying back into earth – the same endless pattern.

  Rhiann’s best dress was stiff and heavy around her knees as she came to her feet and turned, reverently pouring the rest of the mead to the moist dirt beneath her, the last words of the sacred song on her lips. As she straightened, a great cheer burst out, and other musicians joined the flute and drum, for it was a night for celebration, not solemnity, as the black dancers around the fire came to life.

  To keep her full wits Rhiann had taken no saor, and beneath the weight of Urben and Gelert’s stern gazes her spirit was clouded with anxiety, so the touch of the Mother was merely a brush of moth wings in her heart. The druids were a dominating presence this night, anyway, since they read the stars with the aid of the standing stones, and proclaimed when the harvest could begin.

  As Rhiann stepped down from the rock and deliberately made her way towards the crowd, she noticed that even though her two guards remained at a discreet distance, people seemed afraid to come near her. She felt their fear and uncertainty running beneath the wild music. Rhiann yearned to join with them, to know what they thought, yet Urben’s warriors were scattered liberally through the crowd, and stopped their tongues.

  Now Rhiann heard an even greater shout, as the people parted for the harvest cart, led by two mares with red-braided manes. In the cart stood Caitlin as harvest queen, holding a corn doll woven from the field’s last sheaf of barley. At the sight of her pale face beneath its crown of hawthorn berries, Rhiann’s frustration peaked and she pushed through the cheering crowd to walk close by the cart’s wheel.

  Her eyes fixed anxiously on Caitlin’s face as she grimaced at the jolts of the wagon, Rhiann did not hear the whispered entreaty at first.

  ‘Lady.’ The whisper became a hiss, and Rhiann immediately recognized Aldera’s voice, yet she did not turn. Among the jostling bodies, no one noticed Aldera touch Rhiann’s hand. ‘Lady, we have all been so worried … I have only seen you from afar … Urben has spread the word he had no choice, that your prince is not coming back, that the council thinks Lorn should be king.’

  Rhiann risked a glance over her shoulder. On a slight rise to one side, Gelert watched the dancers, his aloofness a
thin veneer over his disdain. He had kept a careful distance from Urben, arriving with his druids in his horse-head mask to sacrifice a yearling calf to the gods. On the other side of the ancestor stone, Urben surveyed the crowd with a wolfish smile, and Lorn with a set to his jaw.

  Rhiann ducked her head, as if missing her footing. ‘It is all lies,’ she murmured to Aldera. ‘We are safe, for the moment, yet I would know how Urben explains our imprisonment.’

  Aldera nudged closer, clapping her hands above her head in time with the drum. ‘It has been spread around that the war leader and his foster-brother are dead, and that you and Caitlin have been struck ill with grief and mourning, and must rest in isolation. He said that now the prince is gone Dunadd is vulnerable, and he has taken it upon himself to protect you.’

  Rhiann let out a strangled grunt, and sensed Aldera’s eyes flick towards her.

  ‘Finan is with us,’ Aldera hurried to continue. ‘He and Bran have tried to stir up the warriors who are left, but your prince took the most loyal with him, and the Epidii men are … confused … their loyalty torn between their own people and their oaths to your man. Finan was all for launching an attack on Urben’s guards, but not enough men would join him, and they feared harming the women and children. This is what has kept the people silent – it is the indecision, you see, the confusion.’

  ‘Yet Lorn has not been made king,’ Rhiann murmured. ‘How does Urben explain this?’

  ‘The chief druid announced that the day for the king-making is not yet – that they must wait for an auspicious day.’

  Rhiann snorted with contempt. ‘Auspicious!’ she hissed. ‘Urben is waiting because he knows Eremon is alive; that he will return and fight! He wants that settled before he proclaims this new king. He is afraid, even now!’

  ‘I pray that is true, lady, I pray.’

  Rhiann shook her head, the fierce frustration she had felt at Belen’s passivity burning in her gut. There were hundreds of people in the village, more than the warriors Urben brought with him. If they could only work together … Words, fighting words, sprang to her lips, then an image blotted out all else in her mind: Talorc’s wife rocking herself before her hearth.

  The words died in Rhiann’s throat, and tears pricked at her eyes. She half turned her head to meet Aldera’s gaze beneath the confusion of waving arms and banging of a drum in her ear. That calm face could quiet five children with one look, and now it gave Rhiann strength.

  ‘Tell the men to do nothing,’ Rhiann said heavily.

  Aldera blinked in surprise, opening her mouth to argue.

  ‘Nothing!’ Rhiann whispered urgently. ‘I wish no harm to come to anyone on our behalf. We live, we are holding strong, and we will wait.’ She glanced up at Caitlin, who forced a shaky grin as the cart came to a halt for her to receive the people’s acclaim.

  Rhiann saw the understanding dawn in Aldera’s eyes.

  ‘We will wait for Eremon,’ Rhiann added firmly. ‘He is the one who will find a way out of this.’

  The next day, perhaps because of the long night, the tension of the rite and the jolting of the cart, Caitlin was fractious, aching and nauseous. Rhiann sorted through her herb stores, frowning, racking her brains for anything that would ease her ailments, and which were safe for the baby. Once every bark packet was unwrapped and every jar unstoppered, and the workbench was an untidy mess of unpacked baskets and earthen pots, she realized that her stocks of some herbs were low, because she had not been replenishing them.

  The reordering, repacking, and pausing to explain the main properties of certain herbs to Eithne, took a satisfying amount of time. By late afternoon, they were both still at the workbench, and the air was scented with a heady mixture of pungent herbs, beeswax, lanolin and honey.

  Caitlin was squatting by the hearth, leaning forward on one hand to stretch her back, stirring the pot of barley porridge set in the coals. Suddenly, she let out a strangled gasp.

  Rhiann glanced over sharply, yet Caitlin did not move or speak, the spoon paused now in the air, dripping sticky globs of porridge.

  ‘Caitlin?’ She walked over and touched Caitlin’s arm, and Caitlin looked mutely up, guilt flaming in her face. ‘What … ?’ Rhiann began, and then her eyes travelled lower, to Caitlin’s bare feet against the floor rushes, splashed with bloody fluid.

  As the shock hit Rhiann, Caitlin swallowed another gasp, and a further gush of blood-streaked water seeped a scarlet trail down her shin to her ankle.

  Caitlin’s frightened eyes dropped to her feet and, forcing down her own shock, Rhiann put a steady hand on her shoulder. It has begun,’ she said calmly.

  But early, at least a moon early. And the blood … She struggled for control, for the healer within her.

  ‘Eithne,’ Rhiann said, her voice sounding as if it came from someone else. ‘Come and finish the porridge for Caitlin. I think we will all need it before this day is through.’

  Caitlin drooped under Rhiann’s arm, as they both shuffled to the end of the room and back, keeping up the steady pacing that had worn flat paths in the rushes. With every pain that came they stopped, and Caitlin panted, her nails digging into Rhiann’s forearm.

  It was night now, and twice Eithne had sponged Caitlin’s sweating, swollen body with cool water from the well, dampening the thin shift she wore. Rhiann prepared every tonic she could think of to calm the womb and halt that trickle of blood.

  Aedan sat on a stool by the hearth, keeping up a steady flow of songs and poems, retelling all the tales that had kept them sane these last two moons. Yet concern shadowed his grey eyes. Didius stayed silent, cross-legged on the rushes, whittling a child’s wooden toy. At length Aedan paused for breath, wiping his brow and drinking deep of his ale, and Caitlin’s pacing feet came to rest before Didius.

  ‘What have you there, Didius?’ Caitlin’s voice cracked with dryness, though Rhiann had kept her sipping water.

  Didius held up the alder-wood toy, a beast with pegged wheels for legs, so it would roll across the floor. ‘It is called a lion,’ he explained quietly, his dark eyes intent on Caitlin’s face. ‘It is like a huge cat, with a horse’s mane.’

  Caitlin laughed and took the toy in her hands, turning it over. ‘How cunning! A cat! My son will be the only child in all Alba to have a … lion … as a playmate.’

  ‘Lions are from a place called Africa,’ Didius volunteered, with a shy smile. ‘They are called the king of beasts.’ Abruptly, he realized what he’d said, and blushed furiously.

  Caitlin handed it back. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘Then worthy indeed of this son.’

  Then another pain took her, and this time she nearly bent double with it. Rhiann panted the breaths with her, gripping her hand, and gradually she straightened.

  ‘Sit on the bench now,’ Rhiann ordered, her fear a sharp kick under her breastbone. ‘I have some willow bark brew cooling, for the pain. Here, I will fetch it.’

  It was late in the night. An agonized cry rent the close air, and Aedan’s voice faltered in its tale, though for a moment his fingers kept up their playing. Then the music, too, faded.

  ‘Caitlin,’ Rhiann begged, as her sister sagged in her arms. ‘Come to the bed now, and rest. There I can rub you, help the pain.’

  Caitlin held her belly, sweat running down her brow, her shift clinging to the bulge in damp folds. She allowed Rhiann to seat her on the sickbed, as Eithne scurried around to prop her up with cushions. Caitlin’s pale face was blotched, and the shadows were now smears under her eyes. ‘Keep going,’ she whispered to Aedan, on the other side of the bedscreen. ‘Take me away from this.’

  Aedan’s throat bobbed as he swallowed a sip of ale, his wide eyes searching for Rhiann on the end of the bed. Silently, Rhiann nodded and bent to rub Caitlin’s feet, concentrating hard to blink her own tears away.

  Yet Aedan had not got far into his next tale when he was cut off by the greatest of Caitlin’s cries yet, and Rhiann was instantly on her feet, soothing her, struggling to smo
oth the fear from her own face. ‘The tales will have to wait,’ she said, around her dry tongue. ‘It is time for you men to leave us; go to Talorc’s house and bide with Belen.’ She turned to Eithne. ‘Top up the water in the cauldron, and find Lorn – tell him I need Aldera and the old women.’

  ‘Yes, lady,’ Eithne whispered.

  Alone, Rhiann gave Caitlin a rowan stick to bite down on while she examined her, pressing on her belly, then carefully sliding a few fingers inside to feel for the womb. As she sponged her hands clean with soapwort, she turned away from Caitlin’s pained gaze.

  For though the waters had broken too early, the night was now far advanced, and the rest was happening nowhere near swiftly enough. Despite the pains, the baby would not come.

  CHAPTER 18

  The rest of the night was a dark tunnel that seemed endless. And yet somehow, the daylight did eventually return, creeping up from the east to spill, damp and cool, through the open doorway.

  In the shadows of the bedplace Caitlin’s eyes were squeezed shut, and she did not seem to see or hear any of the women around her. It was as if the dregs of her energy had been forced inward, to rally her for the waves of crushing pain. Against her drained face, the circles under her eyes grew darker as the sun rose outside.

  ‘The babe should have come by now,’ Aldera ventured. All there knew it, but it must be said.

  Rhiann sat on a stool, her hands lying useless among the bloodstained folds of her dress. Sometime in the night her hair had worked its way free; now she smoothed it back over her ears with shaking hands, as if it mattered.

  Aldera wiped sweat from her brow and upper lip with a clean rag. ‘It must be turned the wrong way.’

  Caitlin let out another whimper, and all the old women looked down at the bed. Those sounds were becoming softer, hour by sweat-soaked hour, as Rhiann’s fear clutched at her ever more desperately.

  ‘She is so small,’ Rhiann whispered. ‘She is small, and he is not.’ Her face twisted; she bit her lip. ‘And now she is losing strength. I cannot risk turning the babe when she is so weak, for she will tear, and bleed.’