Dreaming the Serpent Spear

by Manda Scott

  It was, and with it were Dubornos’ moon-grey and Gunovar’s draught horse and Hawk’s odd-eyed chestnut. The light from the fires stretched just so far and no more, enough to show that their travelling packs were untouched, and the weapons wrapped in oiled skin and bound to the back of the saddle.

  Her father’s blade was there, strapped to the back of Hawk’s horse, that had been sent to Mona for safe keeping, at Eburovic’s command. She felt it as a tangible presence, as if her great-great-grandfather had made it newly and lifted it from the fires and placed it in her hand, still smelling of burned iron and his sweat. She felt the roughness of his face as he kissed her, and his hands on her shoulders and his voice, speaking, but not the words that he said. He was her father, and not her father, a different part of her lineage.

  The blade sang to her, as it had not done in the silent dell by the gods’ pool with Valerius watching over her as if she might break, and her son setting fire to the Roman watchtower in the first attack of a war. Or perhaps it had sung just the same and she had not been able to hear it then.

  The horses were hobbled by a fast-running stream. Under the watch of the Cornovi scouts, she spoke to them, and briefly to the horse-boys on guard, and the blade was hers; wrapped tight and singing. Her palm burned as it had when it was newly cut. She could have wept for the feel of it returning, when she had thought it gone beyond recall.

  She knelt and laid the blade on the stones and heather by the stream. Stars gave her light. The Hunter had passed over, but the Hound remained, reflected in the running water, and the twinned Serpents that followed behind it. She sought, and found, the ties with which Hawk had bound it safe.

  “Not yet. Don’t unwrap it here.” Ardacos was a shadow seen in the silver of the stream. He spoke softly, so that the sound was lost in the rushing water. “If you need to use it to fight your way out, we are lost anyway, but I think it will count for more if it is unwrapped by the fire in front of the elders under the light of the horned moon.” He came close enough to touch. “It can sing to you wrapped as well as unwrapped.”

  She had always trusted his common sense. “Thank you.” She squeezed his arm. “There was no shame in missing the ninth scout.”

  “I should have died for it.” His voice was less bitter than she had feared. “But for this night, I am glad I did not. Just to hear the music they make was worth living a night longer.” He tipped his head down the valley, whence the fire made the trees glow red and the music of the deer-men skittered through the branches. “Do the skull drums of the she-bear sear so strongly the souls of those who are not part of our rites?”

  Breaca grinned. “Far worse. But you have never yet sent a man unwilling to his death. For that you can drum any kind of discord. We will have to move fast now if we are to reach the dancers before the moon rises. The bear is not a friend to the deer. Will you be safe if we go back to the fire?”

  “As safe as anyone. And I’m not going to stay away. We should take the horses. It will look better like that.”

  Her mother rode Hawk’s horse, and Stone was with her.

  Breaca came from between the trees and stopped for a moment where the trees stopped, so that pines stood as honour guards on either side, and the fire made liquid bronze of her hair and turned Hawk’s red horse to heaving, sweating gold.

  She was changed, different, cast in new colours. Graine saw all of those in the first vertiginous moments when it was all she could do to hold on to Bellos and not fall from his shoulders in the whirling madness of the dance and looking out to the trees was one thing too many.

  Graine saw her mother and the horse and the hound and something lit all three from within that was greater than the fire and was not anything she had seen before. Whether it was a healing was another question.

  She could not hear the song of any blade, which was a good thing.

  Holding tight to Bellos’ wrists to keep from falling, she spoke to his upturned face and the quantity of questions it held. “I have never seen the wildfire in my mother. Is this it?”

  “I don’t know.” He was still joyful. “But it’s far more than I was led to expect. What of the bladesong?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t hear it. I think it may be my grandfather’s blade. Valerius gave it to Hawk. It’s still on his horse.”

  Iron clashed on iron in her head as she spoke. Not understanding, she said, “The dance must have opened you to more than is your right. That song is not for others to hear.”

  Bellos’ face was open and wise. He had dreamed on Mona and was given to Briga. He sang as he swung her. “Tonight, child of the moon, everything is for everyone to hear.”

  He had dreamed on Mona and was given to Briga and she was a child and not yet fully healed. Still, she did not believe him.

  The trees parted again. Cygfa came through, and then Ardacos, on Breaca’s other side. Others saw them, and the dancing faltered, and then the singing and the pipes and one of the drums. Its twin kept up an erratic solo for a dozen beats, and then it, too, failed.

  Hawk continued to leap and spin in the circle’s centre; the god filled him and he could not stop. Gunovar matched him, so that he might not be left alone. The rest of the dancers, Cornovi and Eceni, came, sweating, to a standstill.

  Bellos said, “You should go down now.”

  Graine came unsteadily to the ground, holding on to Bellos’ forearms and then his shoulders and then his waist. She hugged him as her feet reached the earth and felt the soft whisper of his lips as he stooped to kiss her head.

  About her, men and women were returning slowly to their senses. Not all of them wished to. Efnís shook his head and bent double with his hands propped on his knees, catching his breath. “Too … soon,” he said. “It should not … have ended yet.” He did not have breath to elaborate, but he was not a broken man, only concerned.

  Dubornos was broken. He stood near Graine, staring east to where the first hard edge of the moon sliced up over the crag’s head. The light of the fire did not touch him at all. He was bone white with his eyes as pits in his face and a black weight of grief about him that cast his decades of melancholy into shade by comparison.

  For no better reason than that she was closest, and she cared for him, Graine slid her hand in his. He flinched and made to step away and then came back to himself and let her small hand hold him, and feel the shaking and the hollowness in his soul and the tunnel that led from it to the god, that was closing.

  He looked down at her and tried to smile and failed. With raw shock, she saw the tears leak to join the sweat on his cheeks. “It’s over,” he said, and his voice had lost all hope. “We were so close, and your mother has broken it.”

  Graine let her hand drop away and did not try to comfort him further. Never in her life had she heard so much grief from any man.

  She turned towards her mother and did not know what she could do, only that what had been shattered must be made whole, and only the Boudica, who had done the breaking, could mend it.

  CHAPTER 36

  GRAINE.

  Graine in the circle of leaping, spinning dancers, holding her own and moving among them, loose limbed and active as a hound whelp on its first hunt.

  Graine swung high onto the shoulders of a blond-haired youth with eyes that shone like moon discs in the firelight.

  Graine laughing — laughing — and looking across the open space to her mother and then not laughing.

  Graine clutching the youth’s arms as he set her down, and letting him kiss her head.

  Graine talking to Efnís, who looked god-dazed, and then Dubornos, who looked as if he had died, only that his body waited for permission to fall. The only colour about him came from the fox fur on his arm, bright as the firelight.

  Graine. Graine coming to see her, a little taller, a little more of the woman-to-be and less of the wounded child; Graine, free, finally, of the bruises and the dark shadows beneath her eyes; Graine, focused and serious, walking across the dancing ground as if it
were the great-house in highest ceremony, looking as Airmid looked, or Luain mac Calma, or Valerius when his gods were with him, and so perhaps it was not too much to hope that she, too, had found healing and been made whole again.

  Graine at the red colt’s shoulder with one hand on the exuberant Stone and the other on her mother’s knee, with her face tilted up showing horn-streaks marked on her forehead in clay over wide sea-grey eyes, turned copper-green in the firelight.

  Graine, child of her soul, not healed after all, but better, saying, “You can’t let it stop now. The seed has been set too often. It can’t break before it goes to the god, or we are all broken with it, not just Dubornos.”

  It was necessary, suddenly, to come down from the horse.

  Breaca slid to the ground and hooked one arm over the saddle to hold herself steady after the madness of the night ride.

  She needed that hold; the world was not as it had been. The beat of the deer-drums still pulsed in the land and came up through the soles of her feet. Her father’s blade sang and would not be silent. Cunobelin’s ring hanging on its thong about her neck pressed into the notch between her collar bones and she heard the breathless whisper of the Sun Hound, dry as old leaves, saying, Daughter.

  Fleetingly, she saw the weave of the worlds stretch out strong and unbroken with Graine at the heart of it. The relief of that was stunning. She held the saddle more tightly that she might not fall.

  She might have taken the ring off then, and given it to her daughter as evidence of that line unbroken, but that a man had come to stand in front of her, painted in red lines from heel to brow, and he had the same eyes as the ancestor-dreamer. He reached for her, and held her wrist, staying her hand.

  More kindly than those eyes allowed, he said, “Not yet. There are things you must do before you can relinquish to others the weight of all that you carry, and this daughter may not hold it all. Remember the question you have been asked.”

  If it comes to it, which will you save, your land or your lineage?

  An elder of the Cornovii could not possibly have heard Venutios; no scout in the world could have come close to them on top of the bare rock. Hairs rose down the length of her spine. “Who are you?”

  “Sûr mac Donnachaidh. Elder. Friend to the Boudica as she was before and as she is now, holder of the threads to past and future. You would not be here alive without my saying it.”

  That much, she believed to be true. Graine was still close, and unafraid. Breaca crouched down so that their eyes were level. Stone pushed between and joined them both. “Heart of life, what is it that’s broken, that must be mended?”

  Her daughter frowned. “The circle. The dance. I don’t know. Dubornos could tell you.”

  Dubornos was not fit to talk. In his stead, the painted deer-elder said, “The horned moon rises. Tonight, my people and yours have danced life into death. The life must be given or the cycle is broken. Already the weaving is fraying loose.”

  Efnís was there, panting, but able. He said, “He’s telling the truth. We have gone too far to let this go. To break the circle now would bring ruin to more than the Cornovii.”

  Breaca said, “You could have stopped this before it began. Why did you not?”

  He was the man named next Elder of Mona. With all the gravity of that, he said, “I could not have stopped it. I could only have refused to take part. They wanted Graine and I am sworn to her side. Where she goes, I go. Where she dances, I dance.”

  “She did not have to dance.”

  “I did,” Graine said. “Hawk danced. We couldn’t leave him to do it alone.” The simplicity of a child, and all the layers and layers beneath it.

  Hawk was still dancing after a fashion. The beat of the deer-drums still moved him where it had abandoned Efnís and left Dubornos bereft. He heard his name and was more able to walk than Dubornos. The stag’s head crown gave him height above all of the others as he wove through the throng towards them. He carried it well. The deer-elder swayed aside to make room for him.

  He was breathing as hard as a racehorse, but it was the marks on him that mattered more. From a distance, he had seemed painted as the deer men were. Close, the red that marked him was from knife-cuts, a dozen or more, a hand’s breadth apart, that lined his body as paint lined the elders’. Oddly, they heightened him. He was fit and lean and his body was perfect.

  His mind, too, had grown on Mona; he had lost his arrogance, and his fear. Quite plainly, he had danced to the limits of his endurance and beyond it, but he met Breaca’s gaze more cleanly than he had ever done. The old pulse of the deer-drums swept through them both one last time and was still.

  “I did everything I could to keep your daughter safe,” he said. “I kept my oath.”

  “I know. And are doing so still. You know what they ask of you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you accept it?”

  The deer-elder flinched. Efnís sucked air hissing through his teeth. Graine put out a hand to her mother and took it away again.

  Hawk regarded her calmly. “I would not cling to life if it will bring to ruin all that you have fought for.” He had learned, too, to pick his words as did the dreamers.

  Breaca said, “But you don’t seek to embrace the god in death?”

  “No.”

  There was a hush, and a keening somewhere that she thought was her father’s blade, or possibly the ring, and then found was Dubornos, who stood swaying, and making a noise that should only have come from the lands beyond life.

  The deer-elder begged, silently, his soul in his eyes. He wet his lips and looked down and then up again, framing words and letting them go. Eventually, baldly, “If you do this, we are severed for ever from the god.”

  Breaca said, “Your warriors could kill us all. You would have your sacrifice then.”

  He had considered that, clearly. “It would be for naught; the one anointed must go willingly, or not at all.”

  “Hawk is not willing.”

  “He was before you came. He could be made so again.”

  Breaca turned. “Hawk?”

  His eyes held hers a moment, then, with as much ceremony as any man might achieve who has danced beyond exhaustion and yet carries the god within, he bent his head and lifted off the stag’s full-pointed majesty and held it out to the deer-elder. “I’m sorry. I understand what it means, but to lie now will not help. I was never willing. I will never be so. Life is too precious to cast aside for such as this.”

  Cygfa moved her horse a little closer to Breaca, as she might have done at the start of battle. She said, “Who carries your father’s blade is your son, and so is sacrosanct.”

  The blade lay quiet on the back of the saddle. To untie it was a matter of moments, and then to unwrap the shroud of oiled linen.

  The blade was of day and the power of the sun. The bear on its hilt was cast in bronze and came most to life under the bright light of noon. Even so, it shone in the night-place of the horned god, drawing in the firelight and spinning it out richer and redder to the far edges of the clearing.

  In the shocked space that followed, Breaca said, “Then would you, Hawk of the Coritani and now of the Eceni, accept the blade of my father, in gift this time, not only in trust, knowing that if you accept, you become as my son in all things, as Cygfa is my daughter?”

  “With great gratitude.” His soul sparked deep in his eyes. “You may have to tell Cunomar, though. I would not wish to be responsible for that.”

  A little hoarsely, Ardacos said, “That much, I can do,” and so it was settled, and the Boudica had another son, and this one not of the Sun Hound’s lineage, nor of her own father’s line.

  It was a small thing, the giving of the blade, done with no more ceremony than that she passed it from her hands to his, and he accepted, and tested the weight again as if it were new, and became aware of the occasion and turned and lifted it high to the fire and the dancers beyond it, and let it fall again, in silence.

  In silence. The
appalling keening had stopped. Breaca feared that Dubornos might have lost consciousness, or that his body had caught up with his soul and fallen into death, but it seemed that he was still alive and could walk, which was a miracle, then, as he came closer, was perhaps more a curse.

  The tall, gaunt singer had been melancholy from his early youth when he had first come to Mona, but this night had taken him far beyond that. Grief was etched on every part of his being, a lifetime of hurt laid bare as he had never shown it before. His eyes were tunnels into other worlds and each one of them was torment. He looked through Breaca to Cygfa, whom he had loved for ten years without hope of return, and then back again to Breaca, so that she knew before he spoke what he was going to say.

  “I would go willing to the god.”

  “No!”

  “Dubornos, you can’t.”

  She and the deer-elder spoke together. Their voices clashed like blades across his head. He looked from one to the other and gained a little colour at the challenge they offered. He touched two fingers to the band of tawny vixen pelt on his upper arm. Its warmth fired him.

  “Why not? I have danced under the dark of the moon in the lost time before the horned god sent his daughter to light us; I have set the seed as often as Hawk did; I have drowned in the birthing and come to life again, gasping like a landed salmon; I have found first feet, stumbling under the nine-branched hazel; I have known the first run, tasted the first milk, the first sward, the first beech nuts; I have dug for forage under first snow and seen the rain fall to wash it away in spring; I have watched the young bucks fighting at the time of the rowan berries and have fought them in play and in earnest; I have roared as the stag and cracked horns with him and won and fallen in the same breath. I have lived the life in its cycles times without number and I have danced nearer to the edge of the precipice each time, knowing what I did.

  “From the first, I have envied Hawk his gift of life to the god and now I find that he does not wish to give it. I am a singer. I know what it is to speak with the gods. I understand what we need now, as well as any man might; I can ask from the roots of my soul for the help that we need to keep the land true to the gods and ourselves true to the land. I offer myself willingly in Hawk’s place; to go now, in this cause, would give me the greatest of all possible joy.”