Dreaming the Hound (11 page)

Cygfa, too, was not afraid of death. She said, ‘I would not anger the ghosts of our past, any more than would Ardacos. If they resent our presence, we could give you the blades, and you could hide them.’

Airmid shook her head. ‘No. If I die, then they would be lost for ever. You must each come and place your weapons where they can best lie. Then if need be, any one of us can retrieve them when the war begins.’

When the war begins … That much of the ancestor’s visions seemed certain. Sitting on horseback in the cold night, Breaca watched the many-led Eceni flood forward to crush the legions of Rome. A legionary eagle was ground into gore and the serpent spear hung over—

‘Breaca?’ Airmid had a hand on her arm and Graine had turned sideways on the mare’s withers and was peering up into her face. ‘Can you get down? We need your blade and your father’s. They must go in first. Cunomar can go in with you, to see where they are placed. It may be he will be needed to retrieve them one day. The others can follow in what order they wish.’

‘You want me to go in first?’ Walking unhorsed and unarmed into battle would have been easier.

Airmid raised a brow. Her smile echoed the elder grandmother’s. ‘I do not. The ancient ones have asked for your daughter, for which we should all be grateful.’

Breaca could forget that her daughter was a dreamer, save that the gods would not let her. As the warriors tethered the horses and retrieved their blades, Nemain edged across the sky, showing the way forward. Soft light opened what had been dark and, as had been asked, Graine led the way in. The moon made milk of her skin and dark fire of her hair. She could not ride a running horse to safety, but she walked into the mouth of the ancestors’ grave as if it were her home. Breaca followed a spear’s length behind, in awe of her daughter’s courage.

The entrance was small, so that they must crawl in, even Graine. Inside was tall enough to allow Breaca to bend only her head and shoulders and Ardacos could almost stand upright. Around them, hand-hewn rock closed on both sides, far more tightly than the towering walls of the ancestor’s cave had done. Except at the start, the stone was dry, and the marks incised in lines at shoulder height were clean-edged as if newly done. The smell was of old dust and bone and dry, crumbled turf and it tickled the nose so that, one after the other, the warriors sneezed. Graine and Airmid, who did not sneeze, led the way forward, talking to long-dead ears.

Too soon, Airmid said, ‘Here. It opens into a chamber. There should be room for us all. Come forward slowly.’

They could not have done otherwise. The torches held by the dreamers were of grasses and pine resin and sheep’s fat and the smoke they gave had filled the short corridor. In the chamber of the mound, they cast uneven light and made pale faces amber. Five adults and Cunomar formed two circles around Graine, looking inwards. The dead lay as dust in recesses of the walls. Their voices spat warnings of death and the fate of lost souls.

Sharply, Airmid said, ‘I bring you the child of Nemain; do you not see?’ The whisperings took on a new note and then stopped.

Graine stood very still. The resin and tallow torch billowed in her hand. Wavering light rippled over her hair as if ghost hands stroked it. The noise and the palpable threat diminished. Breaca breathed through strained lungs and wished for the simple dangers of battle. She heard her daughter say, ‘Our warriors would leave their weapons in your care, safe until we need them to drive the men of the war eagle from the land.’

Graine spoke clearly, with adult tones. The torch in her hand flared once more and settled. Patchy shadows fluttered on the walls.

Airmid said, ‘Breaca, Eburovic’s blade must be hidden first. Show it now to the dark.’

Breaca drew her father’s blade from the bear’s pelt wrapping. It lay on her hand, bright as a fish in the torchlight. The weave patterns in the metal were seven generations old and the notch on the blade could still clearly be seen from when her great-grandfather had fought the white-headed champion of the Coritani over a boundary dispute. Newer were the welts across the metal made when her father had fought Amminios’ men in the battle that had killed him. Breaca had taken the sword from his dead hand and had honed it since, but had never rasped the gouges flat.

Her father had spoken to her by the river in the ancestor’s cave, but she had not seen him there. Here, with his blade and his blood in her hand, he became real for her in ways the grave-ghosts could never be.

Breaca? His voice had more body to it than it had done in the cave. Give my blade to the stones of the past.

He was not alone. Her ancestors stood behind him: grandfathers and grandmothers, warriors and smiths, hunters and harness makers, all who had ever held and used the blade with honour crowded in and in until each one of them took up the space in which Eburovic stood. His many-parted voice said, Show the blade to the dark.

Airmid had already said that, but it had not been clear what to do. Here, close to the wall, Breaca could see at shoulder height the ledge cut into the stone wall, of a size to hold a war blade of the old style.

As if the ghosts of her lineage lifted her hands, Breaca felt her arms raised and the blade set into the ledge. It fitted, as if to a sheath, and the unstable flame of the torches brought the blade alive. Blue-black metal rippled as water in the light so that, for the first moments of its resting, the feeding she-bear cast in bronze on the pommel seemed to be drinking at a night-time pool.

Breaca had forgotten that she was in company. Behind her, Cunomar gasped aloud. Ardacos, who was older, and had better control of himself, spoke through clenched teeth the first of the hidden names of his god, then, ‘I did not know your father was one of us.’

Eburovic was gone, or had become part of the blade and the unlight that now concealed it. Breaca stared at the place it had been and could see neither her father nor the weapon. If she had not placed it herself, she would believe the wall to be of solid stone.

Distantly, she heard herself say, ‘Nor did he. The bear was his dream, not his god. But he would have been honoured to hear that you think so.’

An arm brushed Breaca’s sleeve. Graine’s hand fitted into hers, Graine’s voice, full of tides and the echoing ocean said, ‘It is safe. The ghosts of the many dead will keep it so until such time as the people have need of it. This is the blade that will raise the tribes and bind them together against those who would crush them. Do not forget it, nor let others do so.’

‘I won’t.’

It was not enough, but it was as much as Breaca could say. The world was full of fire and shadows and a wren had just died, singing with her daughter’s voice. She felt Airmid’s hand on her shoulder and, as if through a storm, heard Airmid’s calm direction lead the others to place their own blades, and then fold the mail shirts, stolen from Roman cavalry, and hide them in the recesses of the dead. Last was a Roman officer’s cloak, taken from a dead man’s body and used seven times by Ardacos as a disguise to deceive the enemy.

Cunomar alone had no blade and no armour. With no obvious role to play, he stood in the centre of the mound, watching and listening. Afterwards, when they had hidden the remaining weapons, thanked the ancestors and ridden away, the memory that settled on Breaca was the sense of her son at her left shoulder and the naked hunger with which he had watched her hide his grandfather’s blade. He had not spoken, but then he had not needed to; her lineage was his and the ghosts of their joint past knew both of them equally.

What was not clear, and could not be asked, was whether Cunomar had heard Eburovic’s voice as the blade had slid home to its hiding place. If my grandchild ever wields it, know that the death of the Eceni will follow. I trust you to see it does not happen.

They rode on without blades, at night, slowly, in land that had not been free for nearly fifteen years.

By day, they camped without fires and with two of the four warriors awake on watch. Twice, they moved further into woodland,

to avoid Roman patrols; not because the legions might see them, but because the officers’ mounts, more wary than the men, might have scented their horses, or Stone.

Soon after they left the ancestors’ grave, Breaca gave the leadership of the group to Dubornos, who had travelled in the east most recently. After three nights, he gave it to Airmid, who slept alone on a river bank and then, on waking, lit a fire and piled wet leaves on it until a column of smoke as wide as a man rose thickly white to the sky.

At dusk on the same day, a thinner, darker column, drifting to the south, showed on the easterly horizon.

Airmid said, ‘We are expected. Efnis will do what he can.’

Two nights later, guided by smoke, instinct and uncertain dreams, they rode along the bank of a river and followed a track that turned east of north into dense, unmanaged forest. Neither Eceni nor the legions had been here, except perhaps on certain trails which were wider than might be made by deer or bear.

The night was clear and the sky unclouded. The pattern of stars that made the Hare had crested the horizon when they heard the voice of a single man singing the lay of lost souls with a pain that made the loss sound new and raw. Ahead was firelight and a ring of silent, seated figures. Their presence filtered through the trees, like so-many hunting hounds, lying in wait.

Because Airmid had brought them this far, it was possible for Breaca to believe that those waiting were not Romans, armed and ready, but the sense of danger was no less. Through his messenger, Efnis had said that the Eceni were weak and that, lacking a leader, they no longer had the will to resist the many terrors of occupation. He had predicted betrayal and death for the Boudica and all who rode with her, should she ever come east. Only the ancestors, already safely dead, had suggested otherwise, and offered a way forward. They had not said what might happen if their path were not open.

Breaca slid from her horse and found Stone waiting. He leaned into her side, shoving his nose in her hand, as he did at those times when danger pressed most closely. She cupped his muzzle in her palm and thumbed his lips, asking for patience and silence. Around her, the others dismounted, except Graine, who sat alone on the roan mare, waiting to be lifted down.

They were her friends, her companions. Two had been her lovers and might be so again. In pride, driven by the visions of ghosts, she had led them this far into danger. Every war-honed instinct said that there was still time to turn round and lead them back.

Dubornos was closest to her. He had stood in the shadow of his own crucifix in Rome. Five years had not healed the scars of his imprisonment.

She said, ‘Dubornos—’

‘No.’ He smiled. She could not see him, there was not enough light for that, but she could hear the lift of it in his voice. A smile from Dubornos was a rare thing indeed. He reached out in the dark and touched her arm.

‘Don’t think it. We are here because we choose to be and because the gods will it. You are the guide, nothing more.’ His other hand lifted towards her. ‘We brought you this. There are those gathered here who will not want to accept you. It may help sway them.’

Breaca’s fingers fumbled for his and met warm metal. Feeling further, she found that what he offered was a torc: not the relic of her lineage that marked the royal line of her people, but a newer one, made by her father as a gift to Caradoc in the winter of his shipwreck. For five years, it had lain near her bed in the roundhouse on Mona. She had never taken it with her on the lone hunts in the occupied lands.

It was simpler than that made by the ancestors but the lines were fluidly perfect and he had mixed other metals with a good red gold so that, in torchlight, it matched exactly the colour of Breaca’s hair. She knew the feel of it intimately and held it now, warm with the heat of Dubornos’ body.

The gaunt singer was close enough now for Breaca to see the whites of his eyes. In all their adult lives, he had never lied to her. She knew of no man with more integrity. He smiled for a second time and she could have wept for the pain in it, and the promise. Even so, there was still time to turn back.

‘Efnis sings for you.’ Ardacos spoke from behind her. He was not of Nemain, nor did he dream. With Gwyddhien dead, he could have been Warrior of Mona and led all the warriors of the west, adding his mark to those carved on the roof beams of the great house, not living as nursemaid to the Boudica’s children in a land under thrall to Rome.

As Dubornos had done, he reached for her. The feather he gave her was silver, wrought from unsullied metal. Gunovic had made it, in the year before he died. It marked fifty kills, or five hundred, Breaca had forgotten which and it had never mattered; only children and the newly made warriors counted the crow’s feathers that marked their kills. Yet the Eceni, starved of war and its

honour, might need such things.

Ardacos said, ‘Weave this into your hair and go. They know nothing, only that Efnis has promised them a future. You are all he has to offer.’ He gripped her arm above the elbow and clasped her, as close as he came now to an embrace. His touch alone warmed her.

Even so, there was still time.

Ardacos had been her lover once, replacing Airmid, for whom there could be no replacement. Airmid was there now, as she had always been, as she must always be, or life would be unsupportable. She was speaking, saying the same as the others, differently. ‘Breaca, don’t think of turning back. We have seen what Rome has done to the land we grew up in. We can only imagine what has been done to the people. There is not one of us could live with any honour if we turn back now.’

Even so.

‘Mother?’ Graine was still mounted on the roan mare. If they hanged her, she would take half a day to die. ‘We can’t go back now. It’s snowing harder than it was. The Roman patrols will see our tracks as soon as it’s light.’

She was a child and had never tracked another, nor been tracked, but she had grown on Mona, listening to the best hunters the west had ever seen, and she knew the realities of danger in winter as well as any adult. She spoke the plain truth and changed the nature of the choices.