Dreaming the Serpent Spear

by Manda Scott

  “Nothing. I went to meet the bear, not to hunt.”

  “Did you find her?”

  “No. We’re too far south and the legions have hunted too hard.”

  Ardacos pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. He was haggard and tired. Like Venutios, he had aged since the winter and Breaca had not taken time to see it. It was easier to remember him younger, more vital, dancing with a she-bear and her cubs on Mona, than to remember the man who was flogged by Rome and then made himself well enough to fight again less than a month later.

  It was easier to remember either of these than the warrior who had nurtured her son for sixteen years and brought him body and soul to the she-bear, because only by that could he grow from the shadow of the Boudica to be all that he needed to be.

  Because both Ardacos and the question needed more of an answer, Breaca said, “It’s not a choice to make now on a bare rock with nothing to give it shape.”

  “No. But you are hoping you may never have to make it at all.” Ardacos rose to leave. “You are stronger than that, if I am not. When the time comes, don’t step aside because you are wishing the question would pass you by.”

  Venutios was waiting for them by the fire. He was dressed more formally, with a good wool cloak dyed black for Briga and a brooch pin at his shoulder in the shape of the Brigantian horse. A youth stood nearby holding his horse for him. It was Roman bred, with a brand on the left shoulder.

  He said, “I must leave, but I have a gift for you, in parting.”

  “Your question was its own gift.”

  “I know. But that is for later. For now, there are things more pressing. My scouts have been following Paullinus and his legions as they pass down through the lands neighbouring ours. This night, they camped on the borders of the Cornovii and the Coritani. They are being followed, a day behind, by a small party from Mona: a red-haired girl-child and a woman dreamer of the Durotriges, with four other men, one of them a hawk-scout of the Coritani.”

  “Your trackers are good.”

  “The best.” He smiled diffidently. “Excepting only Ardacos who is exceptional and found us before we found him. What do you know of the elder Cornovii and their worship of the horned god?”

  “Very little; the Cornovan dreamers who came to Mona said that they no longer worshipped in the old ways. There were rumours that some of their elders still followed the ancestors’ path, that they gave living men to be the Horned One and to run with the Hunter in the stars, to bring good fortune for the year after.”

  “We have the same rumours. We believe them to be true.” Signals were passing among the Brigantes, of increasing urgency. Venutios’ horse was brought forward. He accepted a hand into the saddle and sent the youth who had held it away.

  Leaning down, he said, “Rome has killed all of their younger dreamers who trained on Mona. The elders who have always followed the old ways are in the ascent and they are as desperate as anyone to be rid of the legions; they will do whatever they believe necessary to achieve that. Tonight is the first horned moon since the summer solstice. If they are going to sacrifice anyone, it will be now.”

  Breaca took a step back from his horse. Pity showed clear on his face; she had never seen that from him, nor expected it. He said, “I had not thought that the threat to your family would come from the tribes. I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you.” The urge to turn and walk away left her rigid. She made herself stand and think and ask the necessary question. “But they won’t take Graine. She’s a child and a woman. She can’t be the god.”

  “Not her, no. And some of her party will be safe. They won’t touch the blind dreamer, or the woman dreamer of the Durotriges, although they may wish her to stand as Briga for them, at least for the night; they will see her presence as a gift of the mother. They will never risk the wrath of Mona, so the soon-Elder is safe, but there are two others in the party and either one might suit them. My scouts have not been close enough to find their identities or how the Cornovii might choose between them.”

  “Dubornos and Hawk.” She stared past him to his warriors and their impatience to be gone. She said, “Dubornos you know. He came to Mona in the year after me. He was taken captive with Caradoc and came back with Cunomar. The other is a young warrior of the Coritani. He—” A half-thought shifted and took shape. “Hawk. They’ll take Hawk. The Cornovii have been at war with the Coritani as long as we have. They have not yet learned that the tribes must fight together to defeat Rome.”

  “The followers of the Horned One think themselves uniquely placed to defeat Rome without help.” Venutios moved his horse back so that they could see past him down the track. Two of his runners were waiting near where it led down from the crag. He said, “Nothing will happen before moonrise. If you will follow my pathmakers, you can reach them by then. It would be good if you had Airmid with you — they hold Nemain as the daughter of their god and would listen to one so closely wedded to her — but there is not time for that. You are the Boudica, given to Briga. They will listen to you. It may be that they will also take heed of what you say.”

  CHAPTER 34

  “HAWK?”

  Hawk was nowhere. In his place were a dozen warriors, all of middle age, who ringed the road, where there had been nothing but morning mist and boulders and nettles and the signs of the legions’ marching.

  There were no women among them, only men, powerfully built and naked but for their knife belts and painted with red clay in straight lines from ankle to brow and armpit to wrist. Their kill-feathers were from a red hen and banded in black down the quills. Their hair was stiff with red ochre and smoothed back in two lines so that they were horned. Their knife belts were of red deerhide, and the knives that hung on them were hilted with antler.

  Graine had not seen a naked man since the night of the assault; only now, through panic and nausea, did she realize the constant, quiet effort that had been made to ensure that she did not. Even now, with danger encircling, Dubornos pushed his horse across so that she might not have to look.

  He was too late, but he had tried and she loved him for it. She looked down at her horse’s mane and breathed hard through her mouth and felt Bellos’ hand on her back between her shoulder blades, and the urgency in it, and the need not to make a scene.

  Newly, Gunovar was near, sitting tall, with her cloak pushed back so that her scars were more readily seen, and the dreamer’s thong from Mona. Throwing her voice out as if she were addressing the elders in the great-house, she said, “We escort the Boudica’s daughter. She has been to Mona for healing after her rape by Rome. She is needed now for her part in the war against the legions. Would you harm her?”

  The men swayed back and forth, like birch in a breeze. One to the left, the northern side, said, “Never harm the child of the Boudica.” His voice was thick with the accent of the ancestors, as if he had not lived through the nightmare of Rome, or even the wars between the tribes that came before it.

  Gunovar said, “So then we may pass?”

  Hawk was there, a long way back, in the trees. Graine saw him, and Dubornos. They turned their heads to look elsewhere.

  The red-painted men swayed once more and came back upright again. The north one said, “Daughter to the Boudica may pass. Alone. Or she may wait with you and your men.”

  It had never occurred to any of the party from Mona that Efnís, Dubornos or Bellos might be considered to be Gunovar’s men. The strangeness of it echoed amongst them. The deer-elder saw it. He stepped up to Gunovar and raised his hand and set the heel of his palm on her forehead, and then his first two fingers, so that she was left with a smudged bar and two vertical lines of red clay paint above the dreamer’s thong.

  He said, “Given of the god. Given to the god. Marked by Rome and by Mona. Now marked by greater than that. We honour you, if they do not.”

  His eyes were deer eyes, wide and brown, but not afraid as deer’s were. He regarded Graine thoughtfully a moment, and then set a small vertical line betw
een her brows. She felt the press of his touch and then a tingling that lasted a long time afterwards where he had left the clay. “Given to the hare-daughter,” he said. “Young, but older inside. Not too young to dance. Better if you come with us and wait with the others.”

  He stepped back and looked round at the scrub woods and heather moors beyond. So that his voice carried, he said, “The Coritani will follow.”

  Hawk was gone, a shadow somewhere in the trees. Still, there was no doubt that he would follow where Graine went, or that Graine would go where the others were taken.

  Gunovar asked, “For what do we wait?”

  “Attendance on the god.”

  They rode west, hard and fast through the day, and attended the god near dusk in a wooded valley, at the foot of a high limestone crag that fell vertically down. A grave mound of the ancestors sat squat and silent on the western lip and the red-painted deer-warriors would not look at it as they reined in their mounts on the crag head.

  The sun was an egg yolk, broken open on the horizon. Rich light spread flatly out, to skim the tops of the trees in the valley below. The white rock was the colour of sulphur, falling away as if the gods’ axe had split it down to the earth. Graine looked over the edge and felt the dream of herself tumble out into oblivion. She froze, clinging to the saddle, and could not move.

  “We can’t go down there.” Bellos said it, who could not see. The nearest deer-men glanced at him sideways with white-rimmed eyes. The leader, who was marked from the others by a single additional red strip that ran upwards from his chin, dismounted and wove a way between the warriors and the sparse young pine that studded the crag’s head.

  He alone was able to look Bellos full in the face. He did so for an age and then nodded and said, “You can.”

  “How? Can you carry us? I cannot see and the child cannot move.”

  The deer-chief shrugged. His face showed a bored contempt. “You go or you die.”

  Gunovar raised her hand and he flinched. She said, “You swore you would not harm the daughter of the Boudica.”

  “We will not. But we cannot protect her if she is here. She is only safe in the valley with us. No man who stays at the crag head when the god comes can live.” He considered, and amended that, nodding to Gunovar. “Nor any woman.” Speaking towards the trees, he said, “If the Coritani wishes to meet his death cleanly, he, too, will come down with us. He cannot be concealed in the land of the Horned One.”

  … to meet his death cleanly…

  Hawk will not die.

  Loudly, in Greek, because they had spoken it a little together on Mona and the deer-men were least likely to know it, Graine said, “Hawk, leave. Find the Boudica. Tell her what has happened.”

  The deer-elder grinned, and seemed less human. He nodded, as if she had played her part right in a ritual of his making. He waited, watching the darkening sun, and the smile faded from his face long after his eyes had taken the red heart of the gods’ fire and drunk it in and made of it something older and less benign. At a certain point, when the sun’s light was almost gone, he lifted his head and barked, deep and low, like a stag at rut.

  The trees moved, and there were three dozen deer-men where there had been nothing, and Hawk was in the centre of them, backed by unsheathed knives. Blood oozed from a line down one side of his face where they had cut him, so that he was red-striped as they were, in parody, or as a beginning.

  Graine saw it and would not believe. A part of her stepped away, to become separate and so safe, as it had done when the rape began. She heard Bellos’ voice, clear as a wren’s. “Don’t go. He will need you to think and care for him. Keep safe and ask Nemain for help.” She did not know if he had spoken aloud or in her mind but it worked and she came back and felt sick which was better than feeling nothing.

  The deer-elder saluted Hawk, and then Graine, linking them. He spoke to his own men in a tongue that was still the grunting of deer and then once more stepped to the edge of the crag. “We go down,” he said, thickly. “Those who need help will be given it.”

  No-one, this time, spoke against him.

  The descent was a nightmare, better not remembered; a precipitous climb in which white, crumbling stone kept Graine alive, and a man who was not one of those she had learned to trust pressed his body to hers, holding her into the rock at the times when her foot slipped or a handhold proved insecure and she began to peel backwards away from the cliff’s face.

  Her head swam and her guts rebelled, but Bellos’ words remained clear in her head so that she held the sight of Hawk in her mind with the single red knife-cut down his face and the power of that kept her moving and putting her feet where she was told and her hands gripped the rock and she did not become paralysed with fear as she might have done and there was an end to it after eternity, when she stood on flat ground, between two drooping birch trees, and clung to the deer-man and let him hold her until the shaking stopped.

  By comparison, the climb up to the cave a short while later was easy. Bellos was helped by the deer-elder because the other deer-warriors would no longer go near him; he saw too much. Following these two, Graine scrambled over white rock and then up a small path that became a series of handholds carved into the rock and then a flat ledge wide enough to walk on that bent round a corner.

  They came to the cave suddenly, as if it had moved out of hiding to reach them, not they it. The mouth gaped wide as a hunting bear’s, easily big enough to swallow them. Fronds of fern drooped over the arch, fringing it with green teeth. Bellos stopped, and then Graine. “The ancestors used this,” he said. “It’s older than the great-house on Mona.”

  The deer-elder touched a hand to the rock, as if it were a thing of his own making, and he justly proud. “It’s older than even the grave mounds of the ancestors. There are bones of deer in this cave on which the year-marks have counted fifty generations and they were old before the marking began.”

  It was impossible to imagine so much time. Graine said, “That’s older than Rome.”

  The deer-elder looked at her and into her and seemed surprised at what he saw. He considered a moment and then stepped back and brushed a fern sideways so that they could see paintings on the wall of men with red-striped bodies and antlered heads.

  “There were dreamers of deer here in the days before Rome was a village with three hens and a starving cow,” he said. His accent was less thick than it had been, as if he no longer needed to set himself apart. He spoke with the same quiet intensity as Luain mac Calma, or Valerius, or, less often, Breaca. “We intend that they shall be here, free to dream, when Rome is reduced to that again. You who fight with us are welcome. The cave will keep you safe in the dark part of the night before the moon rises.”

  They were different as they entered the cave; less prisoners moving under duress, more participants in a rite that had not yet begun. Graine felt an itch in the clay-marked line on her brow as if it were newly made, still hot from the boiling pans. She followed Efnís through a limestone cleft smaller than the big caves of the west, and whiter, but still with room for a fire and the dozens who grouped round it.

  The cavern opened out at the back, to make a wide, circular chamber. Two stag’s skulls adorned the entrance to this, one on either side, and on the arched limestone walls were paintings of stags and horses and hares and men who had become deer and danced to a painted fire.

  A real fire was lit in the centre, far back so that its light barely reached the entrance and could not be seen from outside. Smoke filled the air, lightly: pine and green oak and the singed hair of an animal. Already other deer-men sat in rings about it, too many to count.

  Like deer, Graine and those with her were herded into the farthest corner and left. She sat on the floor, and leaned back on the wall and tried to bring her breathing back to normal. A youth came and offered them oat bannocks, seared to blackness on the fire.

  Dubornos said, “They feast us. We should be honoured.” He sounded like Valerius; his voice had the
same dry irony. She had not seen it before so clearly as a defence against fear.

  Gunovar said, “This is god-food, to mark us for the Horned One. They will have killed a stag. We will all be expected to eat of it before moonset in the morning. I suspect it will not be cooked.”

  “The fire is for other things?” asked Bellos, and was not answered.

  Hawk came in last and did not sit. He stood with his back to the ragged limestone and stared out to the night beyond the cave’s mouth where a sudden, sharp storm had passed over and left the night cool and damp. Sometime in the descent, all their weapons had been removed. Hawk alone had been stripped. The knife wound ran the length of his body, from his hip to his shoulder to his brow. It bled as if newly done.

  Graine shuffled across to sit closer to him. “Do you know what they’ll do?”

  “To you? Nothing. They wouldn’t dare. Even here, the Boudica’s name is set next to the gods’.”

  He had rested his shoulders on the wall. There was blood on it, from an equivalent line down his back. He was slick all over with a light sheen of sweat and there was goose-flesh on his arms. Graine said, “I wasn’t asking about me. What will they do to you?”

  “I don’t know.” Hawk looked down for the first time, away from the cave mouth and the night beyond it. “Our mothers tell us things when we are small, to make us squeal and grow big eyes and stay in the roundhouse until dawn. I believed them, of course, because all children believe their mothers, but then they told us similar things about the Eceni and I have not yet seen any of them to be true.”

  He would not look her in the eyes. The bruise on his lip that came from Valerius’ knife was gone to a faint green so that Graine could not have seen it if she had not known where to look. It mattered less now than it had done.