Dreaming the Hound (37 page)

Cunomar bore her scrutiny quietly for a while, then said, ‘At the time of the hunt, it mattered more than anything to show you what I had done. I didn’t know that I sent you the dream, but I prayed to Nemain and the horned god of the forest that you saw what I had done. If the gods carried the vision to you, it was in answer to my soul’s prayer with three days of fasting to give it strength. I don’t know if I could do it again. Certainly, the elders of the Caledonii did not teach me their dream ways in the year I stayed with them, only how to become a man.’

Only. She ached to embrace him and it could not come from her. Stepping away from the hazel, she loosed the knife from her belt and held it out. ‘I have this for you, and a hound bitch bred by Efnis’ sister which will match Stone in the hunt.’

The knife lay on her palm, dull in the dark. In daylight, a dozen different traders had tried to bargain for it. The blade was plain, single-edged, of the greatest length allowed with a slight curve at the back edge so that it could kill or skin a body with equal ease. The hilt was not ornately tooled, but cast in bronze in the shape of

a hunting bear, rounded along the back so that the hand slid over it easily and the head made the pommel. Inset at the place where the bear’s heart would be, on the left only, was a piece of obsidian carved in the shape of a spear-blade. At certain angles of the firelight, it shone red, as a wound freshly made.

The stars did not light it so, but silvered it, softly. Cunomar stepped for the first time away from the tree in whose shelter he had been standing. Cautiously, almost reverently, he lifted the knife out of her hand.

‘You made this for me after the dream of my hunt?’

‘Yes.’

‘Gods …’ As a child, he had never appreciated beauty for its own sake, only for what it could give him. He breathed now as reverently as Eneit had done when he first heard the soul-song of the spear. To hear the song of a knife was much harder.

Cunomar heard it. With the care of one guarding the sacred, he knelt and laid the blade on the leaf litter. Less carefully, he rose and threw his arms around his mother.

He had grown in height and breadth, but so much more in other ways. His grip was solid and knew where he ended and she began, respecting them both. Breaca felt a warmth on her neck that she thought was his breath and then realized wasn’t.

He had not wept for Eneit as he did for her now.

Clouds had smeared over the stars by the time they stood apart. Speaking was hard. Breaca said, ‘There is too much to say and we can’t talk now. Do you know why I’m here?’

‘Of course.’ He grinned; a year with the Caledonii had not dimmed his delight in his own achievements, nor should it have done. He said, ‘I’ve been here three days. The slavers are due to meet one of Berikos’ men - a lame warrior of the Coritani who fought against you before the Romans came. He has the marks of the fire lizard burned on his arms as proof that he has both killed and taken wounds in war. He raps a knife against the hazel stump as a sign he is here. The noise it makes carries further than you’d think and there’s always one of the Latins listening. When they hear it, the big one with the leaping fish as his shoulder brooch comes to meet him.’

‘The Coritani lizard-man left the clearing before it became dark. If he hasn’t been here, it’s because he is waiting for someone.’

‘You, perhaps? Did he know you were watching him?’

‘Possibly.’ Breaca spun on one heel, listening to a forest at night. Distantly, men in mail moved heavily between the trees. A faint light glowed that was more than the fires and less than the moon. She asked, ‘Do the two slavers with mail stay close to the fish-leaper?’

Cunomar had heard what she heard. He knelt and retrieved the bear-hilted knife. ‘Only one of them comes this far,’ he said. ‘The other waits nearer the fair, to keep away passersby.’

‘In case they discover that the Coritani have taken to selling human lives for gold and a fish-badged Latin buys them.’ Breaca drew her own knife. ‘They’re on their way. Bringing torches, no less, which should blind them to anything beyond their reach. Good. We should move …’

They stepped back and back and the space around them was black compared to the fire of the resin torches the slavers brought with them and any noise they made was lost in the clatter of men not trained to stalk in a forest at night.

The Latin trader came first, with his mail-clad ex-legionary bodyguard. The jewelled fish on his tunic leaped bright under the flame. The lizard-marked Coritani warrior was slower to arrive and came without light, treading silently; he had been a hunter once, of men as well as animals. He spoke Latin with a Gaulish accent and was answered in kind with passwords that both sides knew. If he was aware he was being watched, he hid it well.

Both men were used to dealing and gave no concessions; the trading passed smoothly, as if they were, indeed, exchanging a war trained colt for a wagon of hides. Breaca listened less to the detail than the tone. It was not a new venture, nor a first meeting, simply the latest in a series of tightly made bargains.

Beside her, Cunomar knelt on one knee with one hand on his spear, his whole attention focused on the meeting. He shivered all over, lightly, in the way Stone did in the hunt, transfixed by a hare. She had seen the same in Ardacos before battle when the she-bear filled him most. She wanted very badly for him to see Cunomar now.

The bargain was struck: a dozen youths nearing adult age were to be delivered to the sea port just south of Camulodunum in exchange for the payment of thirty flagons of good wine, marked with the emperor’s stamp, three pitchers of olives and an unspecified amount of gold that changed hands on the spot, as surety. The lizard-man counted the coins and tied them in his belt-pouch. They chimed gently against his thigh.

At a signal from the fish-badged Latin, the men parted. The slaver and his bodyguard took their torches and threaded back along the paths to their fire. The lizard-marked Coritani waited with his back to the hazel stump. He had been a good warrior in his day, the lizard marks said so; he must know he was being watched. He glanced around, warily, but without fear.

Breaca felt a tap on her shoulder. So quietly that his voice came into her mind as had the spear-song, Cunomar said, ‘We can’t kill the Latins, their deaths would bring down reprisals on everyone at the fair, but Rome will not care if a lizard-warrior of the Coritani dies to a bear in the forest.’

‘Or if he falls into the river and drowns?’ Breaca had thought the same. A prickle of almost-danger thrilled her skin. The Coritani warrior could feel it as well as she. He had drawn his knife and was stepping back into the deeper forest, keeping trees at his back for safety.

Breaca said, ‘There may be more of them waiting. He would be a fool to have come alone.’

Cunomar flashed her a shattering smile. The moon had risen, enough to fire the gold of his hair. His eyes were amber and alive with the night. He said, ‘I don’t think he’s a fool. At least three other warriors wait beyond the margins of the trees. But we are the Boudica and her son, who is the bear. For us, four men are as nothing.’ His voice was rich and deep and full of promise. ‘Will you hunt with me, Boudica, bringer of victory?’

For five years in the mountains of the west, Breaca had hunted alone at either end of the battle season.

She had done so out of choice when there were others who could have accompanied her and shared the risk and the elation of each kill. At different times and in different ways, Ardacos and Cygfa, Gwyddhien and Braint had all offered to join her on the crossing to the mainland and she had turned them down with platitudes, never saying that she cherished each year the months of solitude, the freedom of self-reliance after the necessary dependencies of battle.

Through the years, she had thought that she could have shared the experience only with Caradoc, and the loss of that had been yet another layer in her grief for the greater loss, wearing thin over the years until it became simply another part of her soul.

On the night she hunted the Coritani lizard-warriors in the company of Cunomar, her son, Breaca learned for the first time what it might have been to hunt with his father. The joy of it matched the pain, and both were outmatched by the pure, fluent beauty of the hunting.

The enemy were five; the fire-marked Coritani slave seller and the two men and two women of his honour guard. All were lizard marked for kills and wounds in battle, and they were not as nothing.

Starlight and the cloud-veiled moon made the forest a place of shifting greys and blacks. The first of the enemy, who had taken gold from the slave traders, backed away from the meeting place knife-handed, showing a flash of iron where sense would have kept him still.

Knife-song joined the spear-songs in the whisperings of a forest at night. Cunomar tapped two fingers across his own forearm and angled his head west. They were on Eceni territory, in Eceni hunting lands; he knew the forest as Breaca did, and the Coritani lizard-fighters did not. Breaca nodded and made her own signal, pressing the heel of her hand towards the earth.

They separated, mother and son, folding into a forest that welcomed them, and when they met again they were between the Coritani slave seller and the four warriors of his honour guard.

They did not kill him then; the honour of the hunt demanded that he be last. Breaca lifted a stone the size of her fist and sent it rolling to her left. Leaf litter and small branches creaked in its path. The slave seller froze and twisted and pushed himself into the bole of a beech tree and the whipping undergrowth around it. Ahead, two of his honour guard separated, and were no longer acting as shields, one for the other.

There was no room to use her sling and no need yet for a knife. Breaca broke the neck of the one who took her path, stepping out of the dark to cup a chin and force it sharply up and back and to the side; so much easier to kill an enemy than it had once seemed to kill Graine, even in mercy. Only as she lowered the body did she find that it was a woman, and was sorry.

Cunomar joined her. He had shed his jerkin. The night made armour of his bear-scars, that ran in long crosswise ribs from shoulders to waist. His knife was blackly wet. The song of it had deepened to the one she had known in the forge, where it would stay now, until broken.

He knelt, and on the body of a woman whom Rome had turned to slaver cut marks that could make it seem as if she were a bear kill. The night became loud with the stench of fresh blood and a stomach laid open.

The wood held its breath, so that even the hunting weasels became briefly still. Ahead, a deer barked in darkness and another

behind. No deer barked at night. They were known now: hunters and hunted; two against three.

Cunomar rose, and stood at his mother’s shoulder. He no longer grinned for her; his face was closed, a still mask of focused intent. They were beyond speech, or the arm-tap signals of the she-bears; for the duration of that hunt, the Boudica and her son became one, two blades of a single weapon. His eyes were her eyes, her thoughts his, from the shame of killing a woman of the tribes to pride in the perfection of the kill. His almost-death was almost hers.

Passing along the edge of a tiny clearing lined with mossed stones and plates of moonlit fungus, Breaca scented blood and heard the grunting exhalation of one fatally struck. Only the prescience of a thousand such hunts made her turn away from the flash of iron that might have been Cunomar’s death, or his kill, so that she stepped instead into the path of the warrior who would have slain her and was able to duck and sidestep and make her own strike. His blade carved a scallop from her shoulder, near the scars of the old-festered spear wound. Her blade caught him messily on the cheek, glancing into his eye.

He was good. A lesser man would have screamed and given way to the pain and so lost his life. This one switched his blade to his left hand and circled her, even as the blood flooded the right side of his face.

Aloud, because it no longer mattered to be silent, Breaca said, ‘If such as we fought together and not apart, Rome would have been banished long since.’

He laughed at her, breathlessly. ‘They are too many … Rome will win and we their allies … better that than slain foe.’

The stones of the clearing hid a small spring. She drove him towards it, using the advantage of two eyes against one. When he stepped on the edge of it and lost his balance, she killed him, stepping in past his knife hand to thrust into his chest. He died choking on blood and the noise no longer mattered.

Cunomar was backed against a tree with cuts across his chest. On a path running away from the clearing, he faced two, openly: the first of the slave sellers with the lizard brands laced up the full length of his forearms and another, older and less marked, who wore his hair raised high in a knot at the back with hawk feathers dangling from it.

The older was the wiser. Hearing Breaca’s kill, he turned to put his back to his shield-mate, so that those two, also, became welded to one.

Breaca stepped back into the night. The height of the moon showed her son braced against the fine bark of an elm with his knife held cleanly in front, as focused in the face of death as he had been in the first moments of the hunt. The elders of the Caledonii had schooled him well, but they had not hunted for five years amongst the enemy as the Boudica had done, where to live took more than the facing of death without fear.

To live now, to enable her son to live, required silence, and unyielding nerve and a lifetime’s understanding of men.

Any man knows when eyes are on him. A warrior awaiting attack knows it soonest and most reliably. Breaca did not, then, watch the elder of the two warriors, the one with the strong nose and the high cheeks and the red hawk’s feathers in his bound-up hair, but exclusively and intently his companion, who faced Cunomar’s knife and could not shift his attention without risking death.

A hawthorn thicket scratched her back. Above, damp branches dripped the aftermath of rain. Undergrowth gave way before her and the forest’s floor yielded beneath each measure of her feet as, slowly, so slowly, Breaca came up alongside the two back-joined Coritani warriors.