Dreaming the Hound (38 page)

An eternity passed amid the rising scents of a damp woodland and then only branches separated her from them. They were two heads, two pale ears with hair bound up behind them, two necks left vulnerable because no warrior of the tribes wore a helmet or neck armour when hunting.

Moss sprang underfoot. A leaf stroked her cheek. The Coritani slave seller who would trade her children for Roman gold felt the weight of her attention.

Harshly, he said, ‘Watch to your right!’ and the warrior of the red hawk did so, and swore, violently. The Boudica was less than an arm’s reach away, a blood-splashed face framed by branches, when he had thought that same dense woodland was his protection.

He was fast, but she had come at his right, and a little behind, which is hardest to strike for a right-handed man unless he can reverse his blade in time. He tried, and in the trying lost the chance to drop and roll, which might have saved him. Still, he ducked sideways and so the strike which was aimed at his chest caught him instead across the abdomen, messily. Dying, he could still attack and did so, catching her across the calf before she reversed her knife and struck his temple with the hilt and then laid open his throat to the backbone.

The lizard-branded slave seller died more swiftly, caught between the Boudica and her son. Breaca caught the man’s knife arm from behind and Cunomar struck at his chest and then his throat so that the body she held became rigid and then lax and she could lower it to the ground.

She took a breath and then another and chose not to watch the swift departure of souls, but instead to watch Cunomar, who took one deep breath and then sank to his knees and was sick.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. It’s worse to feel nothing.’ She held his shoulders and waited while another wave of nausea rocked him. He was shaking, as he had been before, from the exertion and the intent and the nearness of death. From the first kill to the last had been less time than it took to drink a beaker of ale, and had felt a lifetime. She said, ‘You have been in battle before, but never as a warrior. Do you know the difference now?’

‘Gods, yes.’ He knelt on all fours and spat, taking a handful of leaves to wipe his mouth. ‘I thought the bear-kill was hardest, but it’s not like killing a warrior, alone and … unprotected. The she bears spent so long protecting me when we fought in the west. I didn’t know…’

He rocked back on his heels. He was filthy; leaf litter smeared his face and blood ran freely from the cuts on his chest. He looked down at himself, in shock.

Breaca said, ‘They’ll hurt later. A lot. Airmid has a salve that will help keep them from festering, but very little helps the pain.’ She let go of his shoulders and sat down away from the bodies of the two Coritani warriors. ‘I’m sure the she-bears have salves the same.’

Cunomar picked more leaf litter and cleaned the blood from his chest. ‘Are you sending me back?’

‘No, of course not. You are a man now. I have no power to send you anywhere, and I would not wish you to leave now when you have barely returned. But still, you should consider it. The steading is no different from when you left. I have not yet raised a war host, only begun the arming of those who might join me one day. We may yet all die to Rome, or find ourselves taken by these …’ She nudged the dead slave seller with her toe. ‘The gods have let us meet, you and I, for which I am more grateful than I can say. I would welcome each day your light in my life, but you’ve tasted true freedom and grown through it; are you certain you want to

live again under the yoke of Rome?’

Cunomar had stopped shaking. He sat back against the tree that had been his protection earlier. Lacing his hands behind his head, he looked up at the stars. ‘The elders of the Caledonii have made me a bear-warrior. If I wish, I can go back to them, I can dance with the she-bear in the autumn and perhaps become one of their warrior-dreamers. I can fight their small battles against small tribes, and the Belgic seafarers who land on their coast and take their women. Or I could come home and live among the Eceni, and starve when they starve and fight with the Boudica when the time comes to fight.’ He unhooked his hands and wiped another smear of blood from his chest. ‘What did Eneit say before he died?’

‘That he loved you, which you knew, and that he would wait for you in the lands beyond life. That you were to find the courage to live on from that day - which you have done. And he said to remember his name, which means “spirit”, and to give it to your first-born son.’

He was silent a while. The bodies of the slain warriors cooled and the blood ceased to leak from their death wounds. Cunomar reached forward and stripped the hawk feathers from the high-tied hair of the older man.

‘We should make the bear-marks on their bodies and give them to the river,’ he said, absently, and then, standing, ‘If I am to have a son, and to name him Eneit, I would have him born and live among the Eceni, with Eceni blood in his veins.’ He was smiling at Breaca, shyly, in a way that took her heart and twisted it apart. He held so much of his father, and was so uniquely himself. ‘If I wanted to come home, would you have me?’

Before, he had been the one to make the first move. Now, Breaca pushed herself to standing, and found that the cut in her leg had stiffened and made her lame. He met her partway and they embraced this time as adults, as warriors who have staked their lives on each other’s skill, as mother to her first-born son, with all that entails, as the Boudica to the son of Caradoc, who had left a child and come home more than she had ever hoped he could be.

His welcoming arms enfolded her. She pressed her head to his shoulders and smelled his skin, as she had when he was first born and never since. She looked into his eyes, which were level with hers and waited calmly, as the bear-dreamers of the Caledonii had taught him.

‘My world would be broken without you,’ she said, and meant it and then, because tonight all things were possible, ‘If we had five hundred like you, we could rekindle the heart of the Eceni. Even

fifty would be a beginning. Will you journey with me through the summer and see if we can raise enough to make your honour guard?’

XXI.

THE HOUND FROM THE ANCESTORS’ MOUND ACCOMPANIED Valerius on the boat over from Hibernia to Mona and the ferry journey from Mona to the mainland, watching as he retched bile and the last of his old meal onto the deck. It travelled with him as he trekked along the high mountain paths south and a little east and only abandoned him again as he passed the vast, sprawling fortress of the XXth legion and reached the foot of the track that led up to Mithras’ cave. He missed its company, but the beast seemed so clearly bound to Nemain that he could not expect it to follow him into another god’s demesne.

Of necessity, his progress up to the cave was excruciatingly slow. The followers of the bull-slayer did not deal kindly with those who profaned their places of worship and Valerius was no longer an injured officer, ranked as Lion before the god, trekking up with his Father’s permission to sanctify his soul before battle. The route up had never been easy, but this time each step must be tested before it was taken, each yard forward checked for guards or trackers or youthful initiates, who might choose to spend a night out on the mountain, eager to prove their worth in the capture of an apostate.

At each step, Valerius sought to keep open the god-space that Nemain had made in his soul. She had not asked him to abandon his service to Mithras - he could not imagine her doing so - but, having laid bare his self in her presence, it seemed impossible now that he could serve also the soldiers’ god of the legions whose worship was offered only to the best, to the sharpest, to those most dedicated to Rome and empire.

Valerius came on the god’s place in the greyness of dawn and at first did not see what it had become. On his last and only visit, on the eve of Caradoc’s defeat, the entrance to Mithras’ cave had been an unmarked cleft in a rock face at the side of a waterfall, easily missed but for the offerings of honey and corn and small pieces of gold placed with care on finger-wide ledges around the opening.

Now, four years on, a Father who wished to leave his mark most visibly had ordered white lime painted in a band a foot wide around the opening so that the black scar of the cave’s mouth shouted down into the valley and anyone, given to the god or not, would know where he resided.

Valerius would not have done this, nor, he thought, would the grey-robed tribune who had been the Father of the order in his

time. That man had cared more for the old way of things and would not have needed to scream his presence to the world. Valerius wondered if the new governor were branded for the bull slayer: the act had the mark of a man who fed on self-publicity and the adulation of others as Suetonius Paulinus was said to do.

On this morning, of all mornings, the effect was not quite as had been intended. The wind had risen and was playing with the waterfall so that the white-painted mouth was blurred by the whiter spray and Valerius saw the full horror only when he stood directly before it.

It was crushingly ugly. Brash offerings had been left, to match the paint. A gold chain hung from a peg driven into the rock; a flagon of wine lay unbroken, its wax seal stamped with Claudius’ mark to demonstrate the age and worth of the vintage; a single ocean pearl threaded on gold wire dangled from the hazel that drooped over the waterfall, a drop of shining milk in the wet. Only the last of these added to the sanctity of the place. Valerius felt an ache in his back teeth that was the first whisper of the god’s discomfort.

He did not want to enter the presence of one he had served tainted with the gloss of false offerings. Leaving his pack, he tracked back one hundred paces and waited, watching. When he was certain that neither men nor animals had tracked his climb up, he stripped and eased his way gingerly down over wet rocks to the pool at the foot of the waterfall.

Water thundered around him, spray-bright and savage. A decade’s service in the west had not dimmed his awe at the sheer, mind-numbing power of a river falling over a cliff. Like a child, he spread his arms and let the water sting his face and chest, flaying him awake. The brand at his sternum tingled lightly but no more; the time was long gone when the pain of it reminded him of his duty.

More alert, he stepped off the last rock into the water. The cold did not steal his breath as it had in the river outside the dreamers’ chamber; he could think this time, and not lose himself. Grateful for that, he ducked his head under and let the raw current sweep the rest of his skin clean.

With cleanliness came a fresh awareness. He had not been welcome on Mona and the pain of that stayed with him. It did not leave now, but he was alive in spite of it, free to drink in the sharp air and the crystalline water, the piercing sky and the cry of the yearling buzzard that hunted early, ragged from winter and too hungry to wait until full light. That pain touched him, but pleasantly. Valerius found he could see forward to a time when it

would be assuaged by food and rest and the play of high winds. That surprised him; he had not known that Nemain’s soul-opening would allow him to see forward, even for an impatient bird. He rediscovered her presence as a gift and bathed himself in it as he bathed in the water.

Later, dry and clothed, he gathered the gold and the wine from the cave’s mouth and cast them into the river. It was no longer his duty, but he wished Mithras no ill and this was a service he was uniquely placed to offer. Any land-sourced water was sacred to Nemain, but she had always been the gateway to the other gods; she could devour such things without harm as the bull-slayer could not. The ache in his teeth died away as the pool took the last dazzling chain. He left the pearl. It had been hung in the hazel with different intent by one who understood the gods’ love of beauty.

There was nothing left, then, to keep Valerius from entering the cave. Holding his mind open, he lit one of the tallow candles he had brought and squeezed in through the white-painted mouth, stealing himself for the belly-crawl in darkness through an ever narrowing tunnel that would bring him into the presence of the god.

That much had not changed. As he had before, he reached the bend in the tunnel where the floor sloped steeply and the only way forward was with his arms outstretched in front and his body bent into the rock. For long moments, it seemed impossible to go either forward or back and he had to crush the urge to panic. When he reached it, the opening out into the cave came as a blessed relief that was as much memory as reality.

He was not the man he had been; his appreciation of this place was greater than before. The ancestor-dreamers of the Hibernians had built of stone the dreaming chamber in which Valerius had passed his long-nights and had made it lightless. Here, the gods, without the help of any dreamers, had built a vaulting cavern : within a mountain so high that it scraped the clouds and they had set within it a lake and a lacing of water that, when touched by a candle’s flame, had been the most heartbreakingly beautiful thing Valerius had ever seen.

The shock of it had brought him to Mithras before. He hoped it would do so again. By feel, he lit the second of his three candles and set it on the rock, then shut his eyes and waited a moment before looking out to where the lake had been, and the dripping jewels of water that had quivered from the ceiling like the gold-wrought tears of the god.

Just too late, the ache in his teeth returned, sharply, but he was too full of expectation to make sense of it.

He should have known; a man who will paint white the mouth of a cave will put his stamp also on that which is most sacred

within it. Iron ringed the lake; a barrier of staves of the kind the legions might place on the margins of their night camps except that these rods were of iron, not wood, and they had been fired and drawn and hand-beaten and stamped at the ends with the mark of the raven, exactly as it was branded on Valerius’ chest, and whereas the legionaries could place their staves with a single stamp into the ground, here, men with chisels and mortar had worked for days to root them into the rock that was the cave’s floor.