Dreaming the Serpent Spear

by Manda Scott

  “Yes, thank you.” Her voice was not her own, but in the clamour of almost-war, it was barely noticed.

  They set her to earth gently. The sun was blinding. The moon sang too loudly. She swayed and Cygfa held her up. Being on the shield had been easier.

  Her mother said, “Graine? Is it the torc?” That voice came more clearly through the siren calls of the other worlds.

  She turned to where she thought Breaca might be. “I don’t know.”

  The gold was lifted from her neck. The singing stopped and she could see. Her mother had dismounted and was crouched in front of her, settling the torc round her own neck. She kissed Graine on the forehead and the ground ceased to heave.

  “We are learning,” Breaca said. “This is not for you yet.” She stood back and studied her daughter. Her face was Briga’s face, mother of all life and the compassion of death. “We have to begin the battle shortly. Are you well enough to help me with the hare?”

  “Yes.” Nothing would have kept her from that.

  They began very soon. Valerius, who had been to the top of the ridge and back, said, “The legions are gathered. He has the cavalry at the wings and the Fourteenth are standing shoulder to shoulder across the width between. The valley’s mouth is a line of iron. There is no way to come at them but from the front.”

  Breaca said, “Thank you. You said they would do that. Does he have the hounds with him?”

  “Of course. He knows this is his day to live or die. He wouldn’t be without them now.”

  Graine had never been at the forefront of a war host. Her mother’s arm was on her shoulder, shielding her as a hawk shields her young. Even so, moths fluttered at her diaphragm and her mouth was stickily dry.

  Breaca looked down and smiled the same, tentative smile she had offered once, on a dawn morning, before they had really come to know one another. “Shall we go, heart of life? I think this day is better started.”

  Her mother mounted. Valerius swung Graine up before her on the black colt with the white legs and Airmid handed her the hare in its sack. It was too late for talking. The colt swung round to face the enemy. The last murmur of the war host halted. In silence, Breaca of the Eceni, Boudica of nations, raised her blade, and in silence sent her colt forward. Two spear-lengths behind, her war host followed.

  The ridge was barely the height of a man; enough only to shield the armies of both sides from each other.

  At the crest, they dismounted. Nemain’s beast was of the earth, and must not be sent to battle from horseback; her mother’s dreams had shown that. The legions waited, as Valerius had said, locked within the safe walls of the valley so that none could come at them but from the front. They stood in perfect rows; shield met square-edged shield in a band of red and black, while polished helmets, sun-welded each to the next, made a brazen line that blurred the faces of the men beneath so that each man was the same, a grain of sand in the ocean of the army. On either side, the cavalry waited, set out in squares on horses that were carved from stone.

  Suetonius Paullinus, governor of Britannia, was in front of them all, mounted on a red horse half a hand higher than any around it. His cloak was black and flowed over its haunches in the way of the statues in Camulodunum. His helmet plumes were white and stuck upright, as straight and high as the limed hair of Cunomar’s she-bears.

  His two smooth-pelted running dogs were leashed and held by a young and very striking warrior of the Atrebates, who bore clan marks that could be seen from halfway across the field. It mattered, clearly, for Rome to be seen to have at least one ally among the tribes.

  It was impossible not to stop, faced by that. It was necessary to go forward. Graine felt her mother’s hand light on her back and heard her mother’s voice say, “Shall we show them who we are?” and they walked down the ridge on foot, with only Stone for company so that, for a moment, it must have seemed to the waiting legions that the Boudica came to face them with only a child and a lame hound and no warriors at all behind her. The cheer then was of derision and the waves of it battered them, as a storm batters a ship.

  They were at the foot of the ridge when the entire line of the Boudica’s war host crested the ridge.

  The legions fell to silence as if their officers had commanded it. The quiet was of a sucked breath, and a cramped hand clenching.

  Against all pride, Graine glanced over her shoulder. She faltered and was still and so Breaca, too, had to turn and look and even she, who had called her war host into being, drew a breath at what she had made.

  Warriors and warriors and warriors stood poised in an endless, beautiful, wild and savage row: men and women, naked and armoured, painted and plain, gold-haired and black, unmounted and mounted on horses of every height in a havoc of clashing colours, of skin, of hair, of tunic and cloak, in Mona’s grey and the gorse yellow of the Trinovantes and the dusk-sky blue of the Eceni and stolen white messenger-cloaks that had once belonged to the enemy, bearing the great-spears of the Votadini and the axes of the Dumnonii and the ancestor-blades of the horse warriors and the wicked, two-edged knives of the limed and painted she-bear.

  They were magnificent in their disorder and the power of their self-belief and on every shield, turned to the fore, was the serpent-spear of the Boudica, painted in red the colour of newly shed horse blood, set on and never allowed to dry.

  For the two of them alone, Graine said, “It’s your dream from the ancestors’ cave: the Roman eagle crushed and the serpent-spear flying over in victory.”

  The Boudica was all of them, made one. Her smile drew the gods from their watching place and made them flesh and blood on the earth. She laid her arm on her daughter’s shoulder and Graine could have become a warrior then, with the power it gave her.

  Breaca said, “Then come with me and make it happen,” and they walked together the last few steps towards the long sloping plain at the foot of the ridge.

  CHAPTER 42

  THE PULSE OF THE EARTH WAS HER OWN PULSE. Sweating under the growing sun, the war hosts of both sides watched her. They would not move now until she had done what she must do; there was that much honour, at least, between them.

  A small river ran to her left, winding snake-like beyond the end of the ridge. Stubborn crows sat in the drooped branches of a hazel there and would not move, whatever the noise. To the right of these, she found a good place to begin it all, nearly opposite the Roman general. His hounds sat still, not yet tense on the leash. He was glorious in his black cloak and white plumes, on his burnished copper horse.

  Breaca had no idea how she looked, only that the torc lay at her neck warm as a living snake and she could feel its brilliance reflected in her daughter’s eyes. Her own hound, Stone, was crippled and it showed in the way he walked. She believed him noble beyond anything of Rome.

  Dew lay still in the shadows of the ridge. Spiders’ webs hung heavy with it in the grass, bejewelled ropes slung from bending stems. It seemed a pity to crush them early, before the war host swept them dead. She stepped over their threshold and onto the open ground beyond.

  “Have you the hare?” she asked.

  “Here,” Graine said.

  In the wide space between the armies, the Boudica and her daughter bent together over Airmid’s doeskin hunting bag. It smelled faintly of woundwort and hemp and stuffily of warm hare’s breath.

  The beast was sleek and fit and lay still, as if tame. Graine crouched and ran the knuckle of her first finger down its back, crooning.

  Breaca said, “Can you hear her song? In the way the warriors hear the bladesong of their weapons?”

  “I think so. I can hear something.” Graine’s eyes were focused elsewhere, as if she watched things her mother could not see. “She’s pregnant. You said you wanted that. I can hear the beginning-songs of the young, but they’re small. She can still run if she has to.”

  The gods very rarely grant perfection. In this, they came so very close.

  Breaca said, “Can she hear you? Could you ask her to show
us the line we must take, to attack the legions and yet stay safe?”

  A single line creased Graine’s forehead, deepening. Her eyes were wide and grey and focused fully on her mother. “The Roman general has hounds,” she said. “They’ll hunt her, two against one so she has nowhere to turn. She’ll die.”

  There had been a hunt once, a single hound set against a young buck hare. The hare had died. Breaca had not been present for that, and had regretted it since.

  Now, she said, “I think she’ll live, but I can’t be certain. If she dies, there might yet be time to bring the war host away without bloodshed. With an omen so strong, they would accept retreat, even now, and it’s possible the legions wouldn’t dare to follow us, thinking it a ruse to lure them from the safety of their valley.”

  She crouched, and spoke to the yellow eyes of the hare, and through them to her daughter. “Can we take that risk, she and I? You and I? Would the hare offer her life as Dubornos did, in the name of all that we have worked for? If not, we can take her back and let her go somewhere behind the host, well away from Paullinus and his hounds. Airmid will know where.”

  Graine was the Boudica’s daughter. She had lived all her life with the need to fight Rome. There was no chance she would renounce it now, however much she hated the hunt. She bit her lip and closed her eyes, frowning. Eventually, “You need to hold her up to the moon.”

  She looked like Airmid or Valerius when they were dreaming; enough to trust that the god-luck was with them. Luain mac Calma believes her to be the wild piece of the Warrior’s Dance.

  Breaca said, “You do it. I’ll hold Stone.”

  The moon was fading by the day and by the heartbeat. It was closer to the sun than it had been for Dubornos, smaller, and thinner and paler in the sky. Still, it was there; Nemain’s watch on her people.

  Graine turned, and walked forward a little, so that she could clearly be seen by both sides. The hare lay placid across her hands. She lifted it high, so that one could imagine it moon-blessed, and then turned and clearly spoke to it, and placed it on the ground, and stepped back.

  Cygfa said, “Airmid says the hare is pregnant. Did you know?”

  Valerius did know, but not because Airmid had told him. Ever since waking, a substantial part of his awareness had resided with Graine, the hare, and the thin threads by which these two were bound to each other and the moon. The whisper of Nemain had never been loud within him, and there were times when he could barely hear it at all. Now it was a single steady note, like a flame seen in darkness, that blurred to fog the rest of the world.

  Cygfa should not have been close enough to speak to him; the understanding of that came hazily. Without taking his eyes off Graine or the hare, he said, “You can’t ride with me. We agreed that.”

  “No. You said it and I didn’t argue. Longinus the same. But I didn’t know about the hare then. Valerius, it’s pregnant.”

  “That doesn’t mean that you can go where it goes or do what—”

  It was impossible to speak longer. The hare felt him then, as he felt it. It rose up on its hind legs and snuffed the air. Nemain stretched through him, striving to reach to it. Too much of himself was in the way, caught up with the trappings of responsibility and care.

  He faltered, and tried again and was joined by others, tenuously. He knew Airmid by the sense of Breaca within her, and Efnís for the vast chorus of Mona that touched the edge of what he sent; the profound resonance of Bellos he knew for himself alone.

  None of them touched him consistently, and none of them could reach the child or the hare except through him. He had no idea why; he was closest, perhaps, or shared her blood, however distantly. Nothing in that told him how to reach Graine, only that he needed urgently to do so.

  Cygfa was still there. Longinus had moved silently to his other side and both of them should have been safe on the left side of the battle lines, away from the cavalry wedge that Valerius had so carefully built on the right.

  Civilis and his Batavians waited behind him as the iron-hard point of that wedge, with Madb and Huw and three hundred hand-picked warriors of Mona on their flanks. All of them had fought with him either in the charge against the IXth or on Mona and in the battles since; they trusted him as he trusted them, and understood how much rested on the success of their charge.

  Longinus and Cygfa trusted him equally, if not more, but they were too precious to risk in a wedge. He wanted to tell both of them to leave, and could not find the shapes of the words.

  Longinus said, “You have no way to send us back. Enjoy that we are here and do what you must with the hare. It matters now more than anything.”

  The hare did matter more than anything. She was running, and the hounds had been loosed. Valerius felt the beginning of her indecision and the need to reach her consumed him. Lacking the time or will to argue, he closed his eyes and gathered to him all those whom he had tried before to reach and did all that he could to stretch forward to the child and so the beast on the plain.

  There had been a hunt, once, and the hare had come to her for sanctuary and she had failed it. When all Graine’s other dreams had gone, the memory of that had haunted her sleep, not fully a dream and not fully a memory.

  Every part of it came back in full as she stood alone on the plain: the crisp sharpness of Mona’s dawn light, the lift of the hare’s head at the strange scent on the wind, her own movement that sent Stone, in his prime, coursing forward, to hunt and hunt and turn and turn the hare until it doubled back to her, desperate for life, and she had been powerless to save it.

  She was not powerless now, only that she did not know what to do, except to hold the whispering hare-song in her mind as this new hare lopped erratically forward and paused to nibble grass in the broad plain between the armies.

  The war host recognized what she was trying to do before the legions; word passed like wind in corn. The enemy saw it after, and some understood. In ones and twos, they began to strike the pommels of their swords on their shields, taking it up along the rows, thinking that the thunder would drive the hare back in an omen of abject retreat.

  The hare paused and rose up on her hind legs and surveyed the source of the noise.

  Across the plain, the governor’s two coursing hounds saw her and came tight on the leash. The Atrebatan hound-boy wound the leather round his wrists and leaned back against a double pull that threatened to haul him off his feet.

  The hounds belled musically, a semitone apart. Their hides were the blue of fire-fresh iron, heads narrow as snakes, with sleek pelts and ears laid flat in their baying hysteria and long whiplash tails. They reared on their hind legs like bad-mannered colts, and the Atrebatan traitor held them on pain of death if they broke loose too early.

  The hare turned and looked at Graine, who did not know what to do. Once, she had sent a hound against a hare. Never had she imagined she would send a hare against two hounds. She did so now, hurling her own hope and the yearning for victory along the fine thread of the hare-song.

  If she had thrown a spear, it could not have gone so hard, or so fast, or so straight towards the enemy. Seeing it, the governor gave an order. The hound-boy loosed his leashes and the hounds came fast as missiles towards the running beast.

  There was quiet for the hunt. Once the hounds had been loosed, not one man among the legions dared hammer blade to shield for fear of diverting them.

  The Atrebatan had cast them out cleanly, so that they went together, blue matching blue, silent in their intent. They kept a man’s breadth apart, running straight at the hare, ready to turn if she turned, to drive her from one to the other between them until she tired and was lost. Only Rome used two hounds thus in a hare hunt; the tribes did not think it fair to match more than one against Nemain’s beast.

  Calamity came before they reached their quarry. Graine felt the wave of panic as the hare saw the two hounds, and slowed, and did not know which way to turn. She tried to reach the beast and could not; the singing thread that bound them
was swamped by the raw, red terror. Worse than that, fear reached back to her, a clawing, panting, annihilation coming so fast and so hard and so—

  “Don’t let it touch you.” Breaca was at her one side, Stone on the other. Between them, they held her up. “Graine. Is there anyone else who can help?”

  She felt it then, beyond the clamour of the hounds and the soul-destroying fear; Valerius was there, with others behind him, less clear. Like reaching across a broken bridge, she stretched for him and for Nemain, who stood behind. Sensing her, Valerius stretched in return.

  They stretched, and could not touch.

  The hare faltered. The hounds saw it and increased their speed.

  On the ridge, Cygfa reached for Valerius’ hand.

  In the core of his mind where Corvus remained, Valerius, who had been Bán, heard a questioning voice … what you are to Mithras. And now, I think, to Nemain?

  The bull-slayer stood on the threshold of his awareness, kept safely distant by the need to be true to Nemain. A hound ran at his heels and a serpent drank the blood of the dying bull.

  Valerius saw the moon rise with a bull on her horns, and a bull stand at a gate with the moon lighting its eyes and late, but not too late, he understood. With relief rushing over him, he opened the last gateways to his soul to let the music of both of his gods reach through him equally, and so pass at last unchecked to the child and thus the beast on the plain.

  It was over so fast.

  Thread-straight, spear-straight, god-straight, the hare ran between the two hounds. They were the best Roman gold could buy; each one turned in tightly, in a perfect arc — and met in the centre line where the hare had been, and slammed one into the other so that the one screamed and the other fell silent as a killed sheep with its neck snapped, to lie lifeless on the turf.