Dreaming the Hound (61 page)

He thought they had used heated flint blades to make the scars on his shoulders and back, but had never been sure. At the time, it had been too dark and he had been too lost, too locked into each breath, to care. Afterwards, it had been part of the magic and important not to know how it was done.

Breathe. Dive into the breath. Let it carry you to the core of yourself, where your strength lies.

The elders had said it, over and over, and time had warped so that it seemed he had taken days, months, years of fighting his body, of fighting not to scream, of fighting not to fight, but to lie still under the searing, cutting, nagging knives, before the words had made sense and he had begun to dive with each breath, deeper, further into the core of himself, to where he had found the wellspring of his own endurance.

More, he had found within that place a gateway to the infinit. Beyond the pain were avenues that ran among the stars. There, Cunomar had walked with the spirits of the bear he had slain and the beaver that had been his first kill for the elders, and beyond

them he had met the panoply of gods: Briga and Nemain, Camul the war god of the Trinovantes, and Belin, the sun. Each of them separately had given him a glimpse of what it was to be a dreamer.

He had risen, bear-marked, with two gifts; the first and most palpable was the knowledge of the strength he bore at the core of himself. Beyond that, the gift that bore aloft his soul was the crack that had opened in the firmament and let him see through, as a dreamer sees, to a possible future.

I wish to be a warrior to surpass my mother and my father, of a stature to lead the rout of Rome. In the presence of the bear-dancers of the Caledonii, Cunomar had spoken aloud the wish of his heart and the elders had sent him back to his people, full of hope and promise. Lying in the dirt and blood and sweat of his own failure, the irony of that, the hubris and the gods’ reckoning after, hit him, as suddenly and as hard as the veteran’s lash through the afternoon: a true dreamer would have seen what was coming and would have avoided it, or would at least know how to find again the crack between the worlds that let his soul walk through.

That place still remained. If he could reach it, he might find sanity and a way to survive the morning, but to do that he had to find a way through the sound of Graine screaming herself hoarse that filled his head.

He rolled over and lay on his stomach. Breathe. Dive into the breath. Let it carry you—

‘Drink. Drink and then wake. Come on. Drink, and wake. It was not so bad, and nothing to tomorrow …’

The voice broke through the shell he was building and would not leave. It dragged him protesting back to pain and the memory of Graine’s voice. Cold splashed on his lips and into his gullet and he would have choked, but a cool hand sealed his mouth and a thumb ran down the side of his throat and he was silent and coughed hard through his nose.

‘Cunomar. Wake. Listen to me. You must wake …’

He knew the voice, distantly. ‘Eneit?’ No, Eneit was dead, given a clean death by his mother. He had understood it at the time and still hated her for it. Now, he hated the arrogance of who he had been.

Not Eneit, then. A cold certainty made him open his eyes, and it was not, after all, too dark to see. The door to the hut was ajar and firelight played at the rim, bright enough to show the feathers in the hair of the Coritani hawk-scout bending over him, and the white scars of the fire-lizard branding crawling up his arm.

Cunomar had forgotten what it was truly to hate, to immerse himself in the all-consuming passion of loathing. He remembered now. His hatred of the procurator, who was a weak man and had never known honour, was a ghosted marsh-flame compared to the burning inferno he felt for the traitor of the Coritani who had found Graine lost on the trackway outside the steading and delivered her alive to the procurator.

Pushing himself to sitting, he said, ‘The mercenaries sang that you returned my sister to them for their pleasure. For that, I will wait for you for ever in the lands beyond life, and you will know no rest.’ His voice was rusty. His breath was meant for other things. He coughed and had to wait until the pain had passed before he could be heard.

The scout shook his head. ‘I went beyond honour. I’m sorry. I did not know they would … do what they did. The Coritani might spear a child taken in war, or cut her throat, but it would be done cleanly. Never … that.’

Cunomar despised him, openly. ‘Why are you here?’

‘To tell you that. To apologize, so that you go to your death tomorrow and pass on afterwards and do not wait for me with hate in your heart in the lands beyond life. The Boudica and her son slew my father; that is well known and you have not denied it. Your deaths will avenge him, but I swear to you on my father’s life that I did not intend what happened to the child.’

‘Then get her free.’

‘I can’t. I have tried to see her, to give her the peace of death, but the procurator’s men are guarding her too closely and they have seen how I feel. I am not trusted any longer near either of the king’s daughters. I’m sorry. On my honour as one who bears the lizard brands, I have tried.’

The scout made to rise. The bear god spoke clearly for once and Cunomar grabbed the man’s wrist, surprising them both. ‘Then try harder. Find Corvus, the prefect who greeted me in Camulodum. He can’t stop, them from hanging us, we killed the procurator’s men and must die for it, but he cares for Graine and could save her yet. He’s leading three cohorts west towards Mona. They can’t have marched far if they’ve left at all. Find him, tell him what’s happened. Bring him here.’

There was a wait, and a changing tension in the arm that he held, then, ‘Perhaps. If there is a way it can be done, I may try.’

The scout pushed back on his heels and upright. He thought for a moment, then said, ‘I have not told them the other name of your

mother, nor will I.’

They must not know she is the Boudica. Ardacos had said it, very early, and Cunomar had said, The hawk-scout knows. It is there to be read on his face. He’ll tell them.

Against all expectation, he had not. Unwilling, Cunomar said, ‘Thank you,’ and meant it.

‘There would have been no honour in telling it. What they do is enough.’ The scout paused in the doorway. He said, ‘Your mother has honour. It shows, and the men of Rome are afraid of her for it. In the morning they will do to her as they have done to you. Don’t try to stop them. It will help her to die faster afterwards.’

In the morning they will do to her as they have done to you. Don’t try to stop them.

Cunomar could not have stopped them, and would not waste his pride trying, for her sake; only bear witness, as she had done, and do what he could to give her strength.

The thought roused him early, so that he was ready when the guard came to the door, bringing slave chains from the wagons to bind them. He had not found the core of his own peace in the night after the hawk-scout had left, nor, he thought, had any of the others; the pain was too great, and the fear of what dawn would bring.

Blinking and haggard, chained to Ardacos on one side and the she-bears on the other, he shuffled into the morning.

And stopped.

The timber wagons had arrived from Camulodunum. The post holes dug by the mercenaries had been filled.

Six crosses ranged from east to west across the steading, for the family of the former king and those closest to them. A gibbet, heavy with ropes, awaited the she-bears.

Cunomar was not sick, but one of the bear-warriors chained at his left retched violently, and he heard, and then smelled, a long, fluid fart as the guts of another gave way. He had only his experience in Rome to thank that he did not similarly disgrace himself. That same experience told him that he would do so eventually, and that by then he would no longer care.

His mother was there. After the crosses, he saw her. She was fixed to the oak stanchion in the centre of the steading, where Cunomar had been tied the day before; dishonoured and alone in

the place that should have given birth to her dream.

She was still the Boudica; every line of her said so. More than anything else now, it mattered that the procurator not find out her identity, but it was hard to see how he could not when it shone from her so clearly: from the copper river of her hair, tied up by the legionaries in a parody of the warrior’s knot, to keep it from her back; from the battle scars that laced every part of her body; from the raging calm in her eyes, that despised the men who held her captive, and stood above them, and beyond.

Cunomar felt the same twist in his heart he had felt when Eneit stood ready to die and knew without doubt that he loved her and was proud of her and it was too late to say so. He would have taken all the horror for her, but could not find a way to do that, or even to help her to do it herself.

That was a new thought and it scared him as much as the crosses had done. Breaca had not been marked for the bear; her long nights had been quieter and she had come home afterwards unscarred. For all her time in battle, leading the warriors or hunting alone amongst the mountains, Cunomar was not convinced that his mother knew how best to keep hold of her sanity in the face of what they would do to her.

Breathe. He wanted to shout it and could not, because if he was deemed to help her, they would harm him, and that would make it worse for her. Dive with the breath, let it carry you inwards. Find the place inside that cannot be broken.

She must have heard something, or felt it. Her forehead came away from the oak and her eyes rested on him and, for an astonishing, blissful moment, he was her son, the bear-dancer, whole and free, and she was the Boudica, given for ever to victory, and nothing could step between them; she loved him and he knew it, and she knew that he loved her and he could dive into the unquiet love of her soul and drown and be happy.

A guard jerked the shackles at his wrists and pain lanced through his body so that he had to shut his eyes to stay on his feet. When he could look again, his mother’s gaze was gone, turned back ‘ into the oak and herself. The procurator had mounted his podium.

‘You are charged with being both a dreamer and an insurgent. Do you deny that you are both?’

‘No.’ She lied to protect Airmid. It was the only gift she could give and they would still die together.

‘Good.’ The procurator nodded to the leader of the mercenaries who stood behind her. ‘Begin.’

XXXVII.

THE HOUND WAS FIRST TO WARN VALERIUS OF THE STRANGER hidden on the margins of the coppice, and then the Crow-horse, less subtly.

Valerius slid from the saddle and made a knot of the reins round the pommel of his saddle that they might not get underfoot.

‘Go on,’ he said to Longinus, who had stopped. ‘Keep going. until you get through the wood. If you reach the edge and I haven’t rejoined you, stop as if you’ve dropped something. Keep talking. If you can, make my voice, too.’

Longinus was fit to ride by then, leading the pack horses. The wagon which had borne him from the battlefield was far behind, hidden in a thicket in the pleasant pretence that they might live to return one day and find it and have use of it again.

Walking beside the Crow-horse, Valerius shrugged out of his mail shirt and hooked it with his helmet across his saddle-pack. His cloak was already there, slip-tied so he could reach it at need They were travelling in the uniform of Roman scouts, with mail and helmet and the sky-blue shoulder cloaks. It was safer than travelling as warriors and as plausible as any cover. Amidst the anarchy of the western battles, they could quite easily have been sent east to Camulodunum with orders for whoever was acting governor. It was safe as long as they avoided any legionary patrols and they had seen none of those; the snow had not lifted long enough to let them forage freely out of their winter billets.

The thicket was small, less than three spear casts long, of beech and birch and small, shrunken oaks. The trees were damp, hung with old rain and new cobwebs, only barely coming to life; birds gathered in them, but not the nests and young there should have been. Valerius sought for and found a deer track, which was wide enough to take him if he dropped to all fours and crawled. The hound led the way and he followed it, silently.

The warrior waiting at the tree’s edge had heard the horses; it would have been impossible for him not to. Longinus did a good job of carrying on a conversation in two voices and four languages so that anyone listening would need to know Latin, Thracian, Gaulish and a smattering of Eceni to fit the flow of it together.

The listener was young, dark-haired and dark-skinned, and armed with a hunting knife far beyond the legal length for anyone not employed directly by the legions. Three red kite feathers fluttering limply from his topknot marked him as a legionary scout and his belt was buckled with the medallion given to those who have excelled themselves; the eagle sparked gold in the weak morning

sun.

The youth moved from the rock behind which he had hidden, to a place at the edge of the thicket, whence he could see, but not be seen by, the men who rode along the path.

A mail shirt hit the ground in a chiming slither of iron, shattering a flock of sparrows from the trees.

‘Damn it, Valerius. It’s gone into the thorn bush. Did you see where it went?’

Longinus was querulous and slurred a little, as if not yet recovered from last night’s wine. He dismounted heavily and went in search of that which had fallen, catching his sword in the undergrowth and cursing in Thracian and Eceni.

The scout shook his head at the weakness of the wine-sodden invaders, huffed through rigid nostrils and relaxed his stance.

Valerius grabbed the thick lock of his hair and hauled back on it, kneed him in the small of the back and pushed him over, kneeling on his shoulder to trap his knife hand.

It was too easy. The scouts who worked for the legions now were young and had not been born to war. Reaching round, Valerius slid the edge of his blade across the boy’s throat, enough to bring the blood leaking from the skin, but not from the great vessels that contained his life.