The Dawn Stag: Book Two of the Dalriada Trilogy

by Jules Watson

  The singing began then, one voice, rising and falling in a primal, wordless tune; an old woman’s voice … no, an ancient voice … and though no music accompanied it, its deeper ranges suggested the boom of a drum.

  Earth. The thought dropped into Rhiann’s mind and, as if the word opened some doorway within her, in flooded a host of images: dark caves in the ground; walls carved with spirals; bones of rock rising from green turf. She saw her open hands, the crushed white blooms on her palm, and then all around her, stalks were suddenly bursting up through the soil, seedlings of every kind of plant and root and tree, their names and natures a whispering tide in her mind.

  Rhiann gasped, and a great breath rushed in, filling her to overflowing as the plants all around her unfurled. She struggled not to drown in that tide, and when she could breathe through it, she realized that a second voice had taken over from the first. It rose and fell in cool ripples of sound, and Rhiann felt rain on her face, running over her tongue. Water, came the thought, and a wind brought her the salt of the sea, streams fell down from high mountains above, and a woman dropped an offering into a sacred pool, as tears fell from her eyes. The grief of this pierced Rhiann so sharply she cried out and, as she opened her mouth, the second great breath rushed in. She felt herself swell with ideas and thoughts and snatches of words that swirled by so quickly she could grasp none.

  The first voice returned now, leaving the low drumming chant behind to soar in flares of sound that leaped and danced. Fire.

  And Rhiann saw burning rock flowing over the ground like a river, and pools bubbling up as steam. Lightning struck a lone tree, and it burst into a crown of flame. And in the centre of a dark forest, people danced around a glowing firepit, which kept the wild things at bay. Rhiann’s third breath pushed inwards of its own accord, searing her nostrils and lungs. It roared like a burning wind, and when at last it eased, the heat rose in a column in her body, bearing on its warm drafts a sparkling multitude of feelings and bright images.

  Her attention was claimed then by the return of the second voice. It had changed again; no longer cool and rippling but hoarse and reedy, like wind in a sea-cave. Air. Rhiann saw clouds racing across a bright moon, and there were ice winds screaming over a high moor, before they sank down into the warm gusts that bring leaves to bare trees. Then Rhiann saw an image of a babe, its first breath flooding its tiny chest, and Rhiann breathed with it, and the entire tide of knowledge that had rushed in with earth and water and fire gathered itself and crashed over her as a wave, human faces and feelings and memories all tumbling by so fast that she could catch none of them, name none of them, own none of them.

  Rhiann’s body was drowning, and she was crushed backwards on the earth, clutching the warm stone to her as an anchor. Dizzy, she clung on and on, until at last the wave receded, leaving only wisps of sense and thought cast up on the shores of her mind.

  So Rhiann lay, gasping with her own breath now, and the two voices came as one again. It is well. The One Who Carries has been filled. The ship has its burden, the mare her rider, the cup its draught.

  She slept.

  It was far into the day when Rhiann surfaced slowly from sleep, the scrape of Didius’s knife on wood and his soft whistling the only sounds in the otherwise empty hut. Blinking to clear her eyes, Rhiann rolled slowly onto her side, noticing a strange tightness in her muscles.

  She recalled little of the night before, beyond the strange dreams that had troubled her. A sudden yawn split her face, and she covered her mouth with one hand. Her spirit must have travelled far indeed in her dreams to mimic the fatigue and lethargy of saor. It happened sometimes, that the spirit flew such great distances it was slow to return to the confines of the body.

  Abruptly, Rhiann blinked again, her gaze sliding down her outflung arm to her hand, which she suddenly realized was clutching something. Hardly daring to breathe, she slowly uncurled her fingers. Lying there was a small, white stone, warm from the heat of her palm.

  CHAPTER 34

  Conaire coughed as an acrid belch of smoke from the burning fort gate billowed over him. His sword out and balanced in his grip, he blinked his streaming eyes and peered through the swirls of ash and cinders.

  He had just completed his circuit of the fort walls, fighting his way around the narrow walkway that ran inside the timber battlements. Now he was back on top of the gatetower, swiftly realizing that he must abandon it before the fire streaming away above his head claimed him, too. He kicked his way through a tangle of Roman soldiers, their bodies flaccid and heavy in death. Then, sheathing his sword, Conaire threw himself over the side of the gate platform, holding on by his hands for a moment before dropping to his feet before Eremon.

  His foster-brother had tugged off his boar helmet and was wiping all the soot and blood from his face through his damp hair, in an effort to stop it running into his eyes.

  ‘Fine cut there,’ Conaire remarked breathlessly, squinting at the shallow slash under Eremon’s right eye.

  Eremon shrugged. ‘Doesn’t need binding.’

  ‘Rhiann will have another scar to admire, then.’

  Eremon’s exhausted grin was lost in a cough. ‘She is not a woman to admire scars.’ He gestured sharply at Rori, Colum and Fergus, who were raiding the Roman bodies inside the gate for weapons, to be offered to the pools around Dunadd.

  Conaire glanced at the bodies piled in the gateway, including those which had fallen from the battlements above, and others who had been cut down as they ran from the burning barracks. Swaying arrow-shafts sprouted from eyes, mouths, groins, and the soft places between the segmented armour plates. The long sword rents in guts and flanks were obscured by blood and trampled mud, but where throats were thrown back in death, the gaping wounds lay open to the sky. ‘She may not love killing, but even she would admire the work of this day, brother.’

  Eremon shrugged again, his mouth tight as he scanned their handiwork. ‘How many dead?’

  ‘Nearly two hundred – and eighty of our own.’

  ‘And how many Roman survivors?’

  ‘Twenty-three.’

  Eremon leaned down to pull a spear free of one of the bodies, then turned it over in his bloodied hands. ‘Call our men together, and line the prisoners up here. I want them kneeling.’ His eyes blazed for a moment into Conaire’s. ‘We will execute them, one by one, except for he who will carry this tale to Agricola.’

  ‘Execute them?’ His chest heaving, Conaire swirled saliva and ash on his tongue before spitting it out.

  ‘That’s what I said,’ Eremon muttered, gazing at the bodies.

  Conaire looked down at his own huge hands: dirt-grimed, callused, the nails broken and crusted with drying blood. These hands had stroked his wife’s back as she tried not to cry into his shoulder. These hands had cradled his babe, his son, as gently as an egg in a nest. They were honourable hands, and killing men in cold blood was not their purpose. His belly burned sick with it, as he had not felt sick at anything else on this gut-churning day. Conaire fixed his gaze on the scorched, splintered gate. ‘We are not like them, brother. We must stay true.’

  ‘And leave more of them to slaughter our women and babes?’ Eremon snapped.

  Glancing up, Conaire caught a flash of the same guilt in his brother’s face. Slowly, he let his breath out, as all the tales of the invaders tumbled through his mind: stories of Roman pillage, rapine and slaughter that had been visited on the southern duns. And he’d seen with his own eyes what they had done to the people of Crinan when they burned it. These men would take his baby son and dash his brains out on the walls of Dunadd.

  Conaire’s hands clenched slowly into fists, as the churning sickness drained away. Raising his head, he met Eremon’s eyes, and saw that his brother’s guilt had been pierced now by a cold determination, a ruthlessness, that Conaire also must find in himself.

  ‘Then we will do it, my brother,’ he said.

  Agricola strode up the timber pier beside the Forth, still glowing with
satisfaction from his flying visit to the camps on the Tay estuary. His heart had swelled upon seeing for himself how well the rich territory – formerly Venicones land – had already been turned over so completely into a storehouse for Roman supplies.

  In the valleys, the pines, elms and oaks were falling under Roman axes, the timber to be carried along the new frontier for the construction of watchtowers and fortlets. The grain was already shooting up in the fields, the cattle were being readied for summer pasture, and virtually all of this fine food would be going straight into Roman bellies. It was as if the whole peninsula between Tay and Forth was one great larder for his men. Surrounded by sea on three sides, the area was easy to defend and well protected by his line of forts on the fourth side. It was a fine foothold for his northern conquest, as he always knew it would be.

  Agricola smiled to himself now as he left his ship behind, drawing in a great lungful of sea air. His swift, energetic steps soon outdistanced his tribunes, and he was alone when he reached his horse, held by a cavalry officer at the end of the pier.

  Agricola’s grin was a rare sight to his men, and the soldier holding the horse was still recovering from it even as his commander mounted the block and began to lever himself into the saddle. Yet Agricola only had one leg over his stallion’s back when he saw another horseman come flying into the outskirts of the port camp. As the soldier on it galloped recklessly down the main path through the tents, heedless of the scattering men, Agricola’s smile froze.

  The approaching horse was as wet as if it had swum a river, but the lather around its jaws and flanks left Agricola in no doubt that it was sweat that streaked its coat. It had been ridden hard, and fast. He swung back to the ground and held his own bridle, murmuring to calm his shying mount as the other horse thundered up.

  And Agricola knew then, looking up into the messenger’s face, that he had left the Tay too soon. The snatch of sixth sense curdled in his belly before it became coherent in his mind.

  ‘Sir … an uprising … on the northern frontier,’ the soldier gasped out, his chest heaving, his face dripping with sweat. ‘Three forts were destroyed; four watchtowers. They also crossed the Gask line and took one supply train. Everything is gone, sir: the cattle, the grain, the mules, the armour.’ He gulped again, nearly gagging, for he was only young, and there was blood and ash on his face and streaking his armour. ‘Some left only naked bodies, sir. Naked bodies without … who weren’t men any more, sir.’

  Agricola said nothing, and for three heartbeats did not move. ‘Survivors?’

  ‘Yes, sir, there are three, one from each fort. They are coming behind me, sir. Two days behind.’

  ‘Three survivors,’ Agricola repeated softly. Three, from 600 men.

  And Agricola realized, in the midst of the red rage that blossomed behind his eyes, that the savages had taken a third again of the number that the emperor had already recalled from him to Rome. The shreds of his dispassionate mind turned over the certainty that the chances of those soldiers being returned were diminishing by the day, in direct proportion to these numbers falling to Alban arrows.

  He’d thought he was the only one with a surprise brewing, but it seemed he had been wrong.

  CHAPTER 35

  Rhiann wound each end of her vervain wreath together, and stood back to see if the hawthorn base would grip the surface of the Stone securely. The other Stones were already dressed with their wreaths, one from each Ban Cré, but it was the last evening before Beltaine, and Rhiann had waited until she could be alone to add hers. Tomorrow morning, the chanters would claim the circle, to begin drawing the Source up from the land with their singing.

  Just as she had when a child, Rhiann now walked with her hands outstretched, first one and then the other catching on the glittering surface of the Stones as she wheeled and turned, her steps those of the spiral dance. Dusk was fast fading into twilight, and the sweep of gilded loch and dark rocks and glowing bracken hills spun as she turned, like a jewelled cloth of many colours. The air was sharp with salt and seaweed, softened by the peat smoke which drifted up from the houses below.

  Sometimes, when Rhiann danced these steps as a child, images had come of lives she’d lived before. Once she found herself singing a song older even than those remembered by the Sisters, and glimpsed herself walking down the avenue of Stones with a collar of jet heavy across her breast. Then, the Stones had been new, and she had woven words of magic into their roots as the holes were dug, and ropes creaked over timber sleds. Sometimes she had even caught glimpses of the ages before the Stones were raised, when she crouched with a deerskin fringe about her feet, cracking open mussels still hot from the coals. And even further back, when all she could remember was wind that cut her lungs with shards of ice, and the crunch of boots on endless snow.

  Spinning to a breathless halt, Rhiann gazed out across the sea-loch. It was the time of day when the water and sky merged into one pool of liquid gold, and though the rim of the sun had already gone, there seemed to be so much more light in the sky, light diffusing from all directions, reflecting back as if inside a shell. The wind had dropped and all was silent, even the gulls.

  ‘It is very fine, is it not?’

  Rhiann turned to see Nerida and Setana on the edge of the ridge, standing arm in arm. The dying light was in their faces, blurring their wrinkles so for a moment they appeared to her not old at all.

  The dream of three nights ago had faded from Rhiann’s mind, becoming only a vague snatch of memory. And though she wondered if Nerida and Setana would be able to shed any light on her sore muscles and that white stone, something stopped her tongue. She had learned here that some mysteries were best left alone. Perhaps they’d sought to bless her, and give her strength for the rite – or perhaps she really had dreamed it.

  ‘You have grown this past year, daughter,’ Setana said abruptly, her bright eyes turned to Rhiann. ‘Did you listen to us after all?’

  ‘Listen?’

  Nerida seemed to be breathing harder than normal, and as she turned from regarding the view, the corners of her mouth twisted with something Rhiann could not name. ‘We said to you,’ she murmured, ‘that we must show women how the Goddess lives in them, by sharing all their joys, their pains, their birth pangs.’

  ‘And you have shared such things, have you not?’ Setana asked softly.

  Rhiann heard in her mind an echo of Caitlin’s screams, and Gabran’s triumphant wail. ‘Yes,’ she whispered.

  Nerida’s bony hand tightened on her staff. ‘What else did we say, child?’

  Rhiann fixed her eyes on the ripples of the loch’s surface, yet her memory had been trained here along with her heart. ‘That I had to surrender to love, that it would root me in the land.’ Her fingers fluttered unconsciously across her flat belly, as she tasted the bitterness of her secret brew on her tongue.

  ‘And have you surrendered, daughter?’ Nerida’s voice wavered.

  Rhiann dropped her hand, turning to face them. ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘Not with everything that is in me, Goddess forgive me.’

  She held her breath, yet Nerida’s blue eyes were only sorrowed. ‘It is yourself you must forgive,’ she sighed. ‘Yet the question only becomes more urgent each time, until you heed it.’

  ‘So it does,’ Setana agreed, looking at Nerida.

  Abruptly, cold fear washed over Rhiann, sweeping away all the strange, blurred sensations. And she was just herself, in her own time, and chill was beginning to creep up from the ground as the light faded. ‘May I ask you, my sisters, what weighs so heavy on your hearts?’

  Setana’s gaze shifted to Rhiann. ‘Yes, you can ask. But we cannot answer, child. We have our own path to walk.’

  ‘A path … away from me?’

  Nerida shook her white head. ‘No, never away, never lost. Have you not trod the ice path with us? Have you not looked upon the Stones on their first day, as we stood beside you? Have you not run with the deer, as we ran with you?’

  Rhiann’s th
roat closed over, and she nodded.

  ‘She was always stubborn,’ Setana remarked to Nerida, her eyes warm. ‘Though she usually listened in the end.’

  ‘Stubborn I may be,’ Rhiann said slowly, her voice hoarse with unshed tears. ‘Yet it seems you were often pleased with demonstrations of my will, even as you scolded me.’

  ‘Pleased!’ Nerida’s staff swept out, pointing. ‘Remember that bramble bush just down there? You nearly broke an ankle scampering after that hare, and then tore your hands and new cloak to pieces rather than give up the chase!’

  ‘Its leg was hurt; I wanted to save it,’ Rhiann protested. Yet her smile was no longer so forced.

  ‘Come!’ The staff thumped once into the ground. ‘There is enough light to go as far as the Golden Loch – perhaps the otters will be at play. We need such reminders of life, after the dark words shared this week.’

  Troubled, Rhiann let herself be drawn down the slope in their wake, guarding their slow steps from behind, silent as they exclaimed over the view and the scent of the soft air. She did not wish to darken its beauty with her questions.

  ‘Rhiann!’ Fola was shaking her. ‘Rhiann, wake up!’

  Sleep lay as heavy as lead in Rhiann’s limbs. She couldn’t understand why she was slumbering so deeply, and finding it hard to wake. She propped herself up on one elbow, but could see from the grey light seeping in under the door-hide that it was still very early.

  ‘I went to the waste pit,’ Fola was saying, kneeling by Rhiann’s pallet. ‘And on the way back I passed Nerida’s house. She told me that she wants you to take all the novices and young initiates out to gather may blossom today.’

  ‘Today?’ Rhiann covered a yawn with her hand.

  ‘It’s Beltaine, silly, or have you forgotten?’

  That got Rhiann’s attention. With a jolt she remembered just what would happen tonight, and how important it was for Eremon. And the nagging fear reawakened, that perhaps it wouldn’t happen because of her. Rubbing her face, she struggled up. ‘But we have not even spoken about the rite tonight. I cannot leave—’