by Manda Scott
“Did you go down to the jetty at dawn?” Gunovar stepped back three more paces and sat down at her side.
Graine said, “How did you know? Did you dream it?”
“No. I saw Bellos go out and asked him where he was going. He hadn’t dreamed you either, he just has better hearing than anyone else. Losing one sense brings up the others. It’s why they used to blind the best dreamers in the old days.”
Gunovar grinned, lopsidedly, as she always did. Because the morning was what it was, Graine took note of the scarring in the other woman’s face and on her hands, of the rolling, uncomfortable way she walked, and realized how long it had been since she had last noticed any of these. Gunovar was not beautiful, and had not been before the Roman inquisitors had broken her — she was too big-boned and thick-set for beauty — but she carried herself with a dignity and self-possession and humour that stepped over such things, so that it was not only possible to see beyond the damage, but essential.
Graine said, “The mist is clearing and the legions are getting ready to launch their boats. The cavalry are there. Before I left, Valerius said that if he were in command, he’d make the cavalry swim across first to take and hold a beachhead so the barges could land safely, but that the governor doesn’t know how to order his cavalry and would probably set them to swim alongside the barges. Did you bring any skald-root with you from the east?”
“Yes. Why?”
“I have an idea. Sulla the ferry woman used to say that the currents of the straits were her friends and she could swim across from one side to the other and back without dying. We’d have to work quickly, before the mist is fully gone, or Sulla will be seen, but if we can do that, there is a thing that can be done that might help us.”
It was a morning to savour the small pleasures: the surprise on Gunovar’s face, and the flash of uninhibited joy that lit her eyes as she understood what was proposed, so that it was possible to see she had been handsome once, and then the swiftness with which she moved and brought her herb sack from the hut and set about doing what was needed while Graine went to find Sulla and see if it was still possible for a ferry woman to swim the straits.
It was indeed possible, and Sulla took the idea and made it better and Dubornos set himself to help her into the straits and out again, which made him less likely to fret over Graine, and so, for a moment, on the brink of war, the island was at peace.
There was long enough, just, to savour it, before a bull’s horn sounded a long, low, looping note that rattled the ribs and shook the air from the chests of all within its reach, signalling the Elder’s call to meeting.
Across the clearing, the dreamers left their morning’s preparations and began to file in pairs and silent handfuls into the great-house where Luain mac Calma waited to discuss with them the dreaming of the night and all previous nights and how they might make use of whatever they learned in defence of their island, and everything it stood for.
By the river, where the skald-root had been boiled, Gunovar stopped scouring out her cooking pot and straightened, frowning. “Do you want to come? Whatever else has happened, you’re still a dreamer by birth and right. You’d be made more than welcome.”
Graine was calf-deep in the stream, washing herself clean of the things she had made. Brown water coursed in furrows around her, turbid with peat. Vaguely, she could see pebbles and sand and the pale shapes of her feet. The right one was still purple-black from arch to ankle where she had tried to kick a man and he had grabbed her foot and crushed it in his hand, forcing it outwards.
She looked at the bruising and made herself speak and not feel. “I haven’t dreamed of anything since we came here. This morning, perhaps, but I don’t remember it.”
She did not say, Bellos and Luain mac Calma think I am the wild piece on the gaming board, and that’s more frightening than having lost the dreaming, because I have no idea what to do or when or even if I can do it if all the rest becomes clear.
Gunovar laid her pot upside down on the damp grass. Straightening with some effort, she said, baldly, “Bellos may be wrong. And mac Calma. It is not unknown.” Her face was quite neutral, offering neither challenge nor support.
Graine stood very still in the water. Her legs were cold. She noticed that as if they were part of something else that should be cared for if she could muster the interest.
For most of her young life, she had been part of the world where a thought might be lifted from the air if it were strong enough; she had never understood why everyone could not do it and some were afraid when it happened. Now she understood both of these, and that this, too, was lost to her.
Something hard lodged in her throat and would not be swallowed away. She said, “Do you dream me as the wild piece on the board?”
The old woman’s face was soft with care. “No. I dream you as a child who is wounded and may yet be healed. Mona has great healing, more than you have yet met. The heart of that is the great-house and if we fail in our defences, the great-house may not be standing after today. Will you not come with me and be present in the company of dreamers one last time?”
She went, because she could think of no reason not to. The cauldron lay upturned on the river bank with the remains of the skald-root beside it, and the cooling embers of a wormwood fire.
“What do you see?”
Bellos God-eyes asked it, who was blind and so, perhaps, had good reason. He set his question quietly, not to interrupt the Elder, Luain mac Calma, who was speaking.
Graine answered the same. “I see a fire badly built of hawthorn and pine, with damp wood and too much smoke so that it has almost no heart.”
The fire trench took half the width of the great-house. They were at the northern end of it, near the folded black mare’s skin where sat Luain mac Calma. The Elder had nodded to her as she came in but there was no greater acknowledgement; Mona’s end was too near to speak to children, however wild their dreaming might be.
“But there is some light?” Bellos asked. “I can feel the heat.”
“A little. It’s red at the heart, yellow almost to white at the place where flames grow out of the wood.”
“People? What do you see of the people?”
“As much as the dark will let me. I see faces that I half remember. I could name some of them perhaps, if it mattered to you.”
He was leading her somewhere and Graine resented it. Gunovar was gone, called early into the press of the dreamers by one of the half-remembered names. Bellos rested his elbow on his knee and tilted his face towards her. The striking blue eyes were almost white in the poor firelight, like ice lit from behind by the sun. They carved their own path into her, which had nothing to do with ordinary seeing. He said, “Sit with the flames then, and make them what you want. There will be time enough for that before the talking is done.”
He was treating her like a child, which was unfair, and it was impossible to make what she wanted: a place full of mystery and dreaming and the answer to the end of Rome. Instead, it was full only of weary, frightened dreamers, sweating in the dank dark, with the fire built badly and smoking and the horsehides on which she sat stiff with age and brine.
More than that, she wanted power and ideas from mac Calma, strategies that would defeat the thousands sent against them. Instead, she sat in the treacherous dark and heard him name exactly the disaster that faced them, and name after it his lack of any answers. He invited the dreamers to share whatever the gods had given overnight and they did so, wordily, lacking the precision and drive of other mornings and other sharings so that time passed and nothing of value was happening except that Sulla had swum to the mainland and back and Dubornos, who had gone to help her, slipped into the great-house and nodded to Graine to signal some measure of success.
Six dreamers had spoken by then; men and women made hoarse and uncertain by the proximity of danger. Their voices had been dull and lifeless, so that simply to stay awake while they spoke was a challenge. Six more spoke after them, as dully and t
o no more benefit, and others, and others.
Frustrated beyond all telling, Graine stared into the fire and wished she had stayed outside with Hawk, who had ideas that made sense and were not based on the shadow of a buzzard seen on water in a dream, or the flight of a spear that took three days to land and killed the Roman governor each day, resurrecting him overnight the better to kill him again on the morrow.
It was not for Bellos but for herself that she built the shapes in the fire. Hawk was first and easiest; it wasn’t hard to take the flames and weave them into his form. She carved out the sharpness of his eyes and the way he rode and laughed, or was serious, according to her mood. She had not noticed, until then, how closely he mirrored her, giving whatever she needed. She sent his image out to do battle against the legions on the foreshore, and he went willingly, leaping over rocks like a deer with his black hair flying behind him and the lizard marks of his clan alive on his arms.
Hawk alone was not enough. Graine wished Valerius were there; however ambivalent she felt about him personally, there was no denying his strengths in fighting Rome; he would never have allowed the Elder’s prevarication. Her mother, too, would have insisted on action rather than words. With flames encompassing all of her vision, Graine thought of black hair and copper, of black eyes and green, of the flash of a dry, ironic smile which could have come equally from one or the other, of the easiness with weapons and horses that should have been her birthright and so clearly was not.
She envied that; in the fire she could admit it and become what she sought. The fire showed her patterns of the warrior she could be, fighting as Cunomar did, or, better, Cygfa, because, even now, Cunomar was still too taken with proving himself and Cygfa was long past that, if she had ever known it.
In her mind and so in the flames, Cygfa came back to Mona, and waited on the foreshore while the Roman cavalry swam their horses across the straits. She sat tall on the white-legged colt who had the mettle of his grandsire; Valerius joined her on the Crow-horse itself and then Breaca, mounted on the bay that had been Cygfa’s gift.
The enemy mounts neared the land. Their manes were white as the crests of Manannan’s horses, which were built of water and waves. They were heading towards the place where Graine had watched the dawn rise. She had been there for a reason, and had not known it then. In the fire-fancy, it made sense; she had made her peace with the god in three days of a storm and again in the quiet of a turning tide. The vast bulk of the water knew her as well as she knew it.
Taking a quiet breath, she sent herself into it, spreading out and out until she had no margins, until all of her was all of the ocean. She felt the lap and rise of the waves and the far slower rhythm of the tide. Within it, she felt the enemy horses like hornets attacking her skin. She could feel a panic in them that was her doing, and was sorry, except that it meant they were more likely to flounder in the sea, which was good.
She did not feel sorry for the men at all; they were jagged iron, with souls that harboured desecration of all that she cherished. It did not feel good to have them there. They were scratching at the place where the tide turned, where the great mass of water that was her soul came to rest and then, answering Nemain’s call, turned about and began to move the other way. There was a fold in it that she knew, that she had known for all eternity, a way of creasing the waves one on the other at the turning of the tide that would do for the men on horseback what they wanted to do for her.
Smiling now, Graine turned herself over in the ocean and felt the fold of the sea crease over and saw the horses flounder and pull away and saw men in armour, unable to keep afloat without the support of their mounts, tumble and sink and spin and become still on the sand that was her resting place and theirs.
They were not all dead. Perhaps a hundred still lived, of the thousand who had set out to swim the straits; such things can happen in a child’s imaginings. These few surged out of the water onto the foreshore near where Graine lay.
She pulled her soul from the sea and fitted back in her body like an arm in a sleeve. She lay flat in the shingle and used the blade of her skinning knife to catch the sun and make flash-signals as Ardacos had taught her. Spears of light went out to dazzle the men, so that, fresh from near-death in the sea, they came to a land of fire and smoke.
The fog-smoke wreathing about them was hers. At some other time, she had placed pots of fire and plants around the headland, full of ash and wood and the poor, damp fire of the great-house and other things she knew of: the smoke of plants that Airmid had taught her about, and Theophilus, the Greek physician who had spent a winter in her company. The story of the skald-root was his, and of the other plants which, when burned, would confuse men and horses. All these, Graine had carried in pots from the great-house, because in the dream she was a warrior, the same as her mother or Valerius, but different.
The smoke they made was thick and vaporous and stole the minds of those who did not know how to protect against it. Even Graine, who had made it, felt that the roof of her mouth was rising to break through the top of her skull. It loosened her mind, making it easier to push the path of her thoughts out from her body into the land and the sea and the smoke.
She remembered Valerius’ stories of what it took out of the men to swim in full armour, and how hard it was for them to fight on the other side. Into the smoke she wove the certainty that the swim had been the ultimate exertion and the men who reached land were too cold and tired to fight. They came out of the water slowly, dazzled and befuddled. Led by Valerius, the five hundred warriors of Mona met them and slew them where they stood, except for Corvus, who was a friend to them all and did not need to die. Graine asked the gods for his life but did not know if they heard her.
There was respite then, for a while, before more of the living came. In time, they paddled in a wide wave across the water. Hundreds of barges packed with men, each one tight with fear and resolution, not fully understanding what had happened on the island.
Graine whistled. Her mother was no longer there, but Valerius and Cygfa rode like the gods’ hunt to the water’s edge. Their horses were vast, with tags of lightning at their polls and crests and thunder rolling from their feet. They were three, against three hundred vessels and eight thousand men, but the fire was on their side, and the smoke, and the three thousand dreamers within it, who were well versed in the dream-fears of the men that Bellos had fostered. They wove a web between them of smoke and sea fog and fear and cast it like a net into the water, ensnaring the legionaries before ever they left their barges.
The five hundred warriors were ready to step into the spaces between and kill men as they stumbled ashore but they were barely needed. The dream-web confused the landing men and set them one against the other so that whole cohorts turned face on and set about each other with the ferocity of fear and fury.
Behind them, the five hundred warriors of Mona waited, to take on those left alive. Graine, only true blood-daughter to the Boudica, raised a hand and brought it down again, as she had seen her mother do, setting it all into action.
Somewhere in the background, a low, monotonous voice was still speaking. The contrast with the brilliant colour and action of the fire-dream was laughable.
Graine? Graine? “Graine?…”
Her name came to her from a long way distant, from outside the great-house, perhaps, or even beyond the island. Cool fingers touched her wrist. Blue eyes the colour of the noon sky came into the line of her sight and Bellos’ hair, framing them, was the dazzle of sheet lightning.
“Graine? It is enough for now. You can stop. Stop. It is enough.”
Her throat hurt. She was croaking like a gannet. Midword, she stopped, and there was silence.
They were silent, all the talking, droning dreamers, watching her and listening as they had been, it seemed, for a long time.
Luain mac Calma was at her side, white with a strain she did not fully understand, as if he had been holding the entire net of the fire-story and all the three thousan
d dreamers within it and the effort had cost him dearly.
He said, “I’m sorry. We had no way to ask it of you, only to hope it might happen. Bellos is right, it is enough and more than enough. All we need now is to put what you have shown us into action as best we can. What was not clear is what plants you would use in the smoke to befuddle the horses and the riders, and how to know Corvus, that we may do what we can to spare him. If you can tell us those things, you can sleep, or you can go back to Hawk, who is angry with us for using you, and may have good reason.”
Graine stared at him, unable to speak. She felt hungry — ravenously, achingly hungry — and tired, and under those, as the meaning of what he said became apparent, she felt a blind, screaming panic that cut holes in her heart and threatened to choke her.
Someone passed her a waterskin and she drank, dribbling gouts of it down the front of her tunic. Still croaking, she said, “It wasn’t a dreaming. I have had those, and this was not that, only an imagining that anyone could have done.”
“Anyone who is the daughter of the Boudica, whose uncle is Valerius, who shares blood with Cygfa, who can build her fancies in a fire made of yarrow and oak when the rest of us are choking so we can barely speak and the tears are streaming from our eyes. We have few enough of those on Mona.” Luain mac Calma was smiling sadly. “I’m sorry. We should not have used you like that, but so much has already been sacrificed for this, and now is not a time to set care of a child above the welfare of Mona. You’re right, it wasn’t a dream. This is not your healing, nor even the beginning of it, but you have given us what we need. Can we be grateful for that now and do with it what we may? If you are angry, which you have every right to be, you can tell me of it later and I will make what amends I can. For now, we have an island in peril and must do what we can to protect it.”
