Dreaming the Hound (65 page)

‘Not really. But she won’t listen to Airmid. She said she would rest but she got up and spent the morning training with the new warriors and the afternoon talking to your brother about his horse. He’s a dreamer, isn’t he, not a warrior or a smith?’

‘Valerius? He’s all of those things, but he’s a dreamer before everything else, yes. How do you know?’

‘His hound walks in his soul. Like Airmid’s frog, and your serpent-spear.’ Graine tilted her head back and studied her mother curiously. ‘That’s new,’ she said. ‘Stronger.’ She continued to look. Her face blurred, as if sleep-drenched, and then cleared again. Her eyes lost some of their haunting. ‘Cunomar doesn’t have a bear like that. He is given to it, but it doesn’t live in him. Is that why he hates your brother?’

‘I think so.’ Breaca bent her neck against the stiffness in her back and pressed her lips to her daughter’s sweated hair. She breathed in the smell, the sharpness of pain and fear and hurt and the aching absence of dreaming. She reached inside for the ancestor, and found her, quietly watchful.

I promised you her life, said the ancestor. You did not ask that she be whole. I could not have made her that.

‘I know. Nobody could. But she sees Valerius’ dream-hound; she cannot, then, be for ever cut off from her dreaming?’

No more than you were.

Once, she would have railed against so ambiguous an answer. Now, she nodded and kissed Graine again and said aloud, ‘Since I first came from the ancestor’s cave, Cunomar has wanted to be the one to lead the rout of Rome. He is afraid now that Valerius will take his place. I have said that only the gods can know who will be alive to fight and that we should all be ready but he is still afraid.’

‘What does the ancestor say?’ Graine squirmed round to see her properly.

‘Nothing. She will speak when it matters and not before. For the moment, all that matters is that you get well again. Can you drink some more milk, do you think?’

They drank, and finished the apple and the cheese and a haunch of roast hare that Airmid had cooked and wrapped in leaves and infused with the faintest taint of poppy, and other things that might bring dreamless sleep.

Breaca lifted Graine and carried her back to the pile of hides that was her own bed and they lay in it together, carefully, curling round to find the places of least discomfort that still let them lie together, skin on skin, finding a semblance of peace in a world racing to war.

Later, when Graine slept, and her breathing was even, Breaca lay quietly awake. She ran her fingers through the oxblood hair and bent forward, painfully, and kissed the place at the back, in the middle, where a small arrowhead of rich red hairs came together.

‘You’re alive,’ she said to the child, and the listening gods. ‘It was all I asked for. For today, that’s enough. Tomorrow, or the day after, we can give thanks that everyone else is alive and then we can raise and arm every warrior of every tribe and push Rome and its legions back into the sea.’

AUTHOR’S NOTE.

THOSE WHO KNOW ANYTHING OF BOUDICA’S STORY, FROM SCHOOL OR modern media histories, know that she was flogged and her daughters were raped and that this was the spark that lit the fires of her revolt against Roman occupation. It makes romantic reading and gave our Victorian forebears an understandable excuse for why and how a woman might have had the opportunity and ability to lead an armed war host in a series of successful military actions; the ‘wronged matron’ fighting to avenge the assault on her daughters ruffles no feathers.

In reality, the atrocities committed by the Roman authorities in the wake of Prasutagos’ death were the end point of a cumulating oppression and, it seems to me, were more likely in retribution for the beginnings of insurrection that was already under way than the trigger that began it. We have no exact date to pinpoint the start of this uprising but it came at a time when Suetonius Paulinus was attacking the druidic island of Mona (now known as Anglesey) and

we can assume that he attacked early in the battle season, simply to give himself time to complete his actions before the autumn. We also know from Tacitus that the tribes ‘… had been careless in sowing corn, people of every age having gone to war …’ from which we can assume that the revolt was under way at the time of the spring plantings - not long after the winter thaw.

If we put these facts together, we have a spring uprising, in which a number of well-armed tribal warriors conducted at least two well-planned raids, which took full advantage of the governor’s preoccupation in the west of the country. It seems to me unlikely that whoever ruled the Eceni could have mustered a war host from amongst a defeated, disarmed nation without some degree of preparation and warning and, given the restrictions of winter, that this preparation had been under way since at least the previous autumn.

If this is the case, then Prasutagos’ death - the timing of which is also inexact - is likely to have come towards the end of those preparations.

Tacitus’ eloquent description of the abuse of the native tribes by the Roman colonists of Camulodunum makes stark reading. A single paragraph summarizes the conditions that led to war:

It was against the veterans that [the rebelling tribes’] hatred was most intense. For these new settlers in the colony of Camulodunum drove people out of their houses, ejected them from their farms, called them captives and slaves and the lawlessness of the veterans was encouraged by the soldiers, who lived a similar life and hoped for similar licence. A temple also erected to the Divine Claudius was ever before their eyes, a citadel, as it seemed, of perpetual tyranny.

Thus we have the Trinovantes in Camulodunum being treated as are all natives by the occupying power: with contempt and little observation of the law. We have also from Suetonius in his Lives of the Caesars the fact that Nero - a profligate spender even by Roman imperial standards - had considered withdrawing his troops from Britain. This in itself might not have caused panic, but Dio Cassius tells us that the imperial adviser Seneca

… in the hope of receiving a good rate of interest, had lent to the islanders 40,000,000 sesterces that they did not want, and had afterwards called in this loan all at once and had resorted to severe measures in exacting it.

The tribes of the east, therefore, were under immense social and political pressure. It is not hard to imagine each new insult pushing them closer to the edge of war and the Eceni were well placed to spark a rebellion. They had been party to a fairly effective armed

revolt in AD 47 and they were not immediately under the thumb of the veterans in Camulodunum as were their neighbours, the Trinovantes. Their king, Prasutagos, however, was a client king, installed by Claudius and presumably considered a loyal Roman subject, unlikely to rebel.

We know very little of Prasutagos other than that he was ‘famed for his long prosperity’ and that he died having made one of the most insane wills in history, which named his two daughters as coinheritors with the emperor.

It is hard to imagine why he did this. Possibilities range from his signing a document he could not read, to his signing a document that was given to him with little option; a case of ‘sign this and we might honour it; don’t sign and we’ll take everything anyway.’

The question of the rights of women to inherit at this point is open. Cicero reports that the ‘Lex Vocania’ broadly forbade any man ‘included in the census’ to make a woman his heir. This was transmuted by Augustus who ruled instead that women might inherit if they had given birth to three children if they were Roman citizens; four if they were freeborn Latins; or five if they were not citizens. This would suggest that girls too young to conceive, or who had failed to marry or to bear children, could not inherit.

This brings us, then, to Prasutagos’ daughters about which precisely nothing is known except that they were ‘outraged’ by the centurions sent to take possession of the entirety of his inheritance at the same time as their mother, the Boudica, was ‘scourged’.

Here, Tacitus is our only source, but he is fairly specific that it was the king’s daughters who were raped and his wife who was flogged. One wonders - at least I wonder - why a group of armed men with nothing whatsoever to lose chose not to rape the wife as well, but paused in their blood-frenzy for long enough to organize a flogging - which is hardly the most spontaneous of events - and then neither raped the Boudica nor slaughtered the entire family afterwards.

Two things seem relevant here, both minor points of Roman law. Elsewhere in Tacitus is a vivid description of the revenge meted out to the family of the traitor Sejanus at the time of Tiberius, roughly half a century before the Boudican revolt. In this, we hear of Sejanus’ young daughter who is dragged off to execution, entirely too young to understand what is going on or why. ‘Historians of the time tell us that, as there was no precedent for the capital punishment of a virgin, she was violated by the executioner, with the rope on her neck.’ Much later, in the fourth century AD, the young woman who became St Agnes was also ‘violated’ before her execution on the grounds that she was a virgin and it was illegal

to execute a girl who had yet to lose her chastity.

If we add to that the very well documented fact that flogging was routinely practised against insurgents prior to their crucifixion (Christ is the obvious case in point) then we have the possibility that the rapes of the girls and the flogging of the Boudica were not simply the acts of men out of control, but the planned prelude to a judicial execution of a family caught in the act of rebellion.

The question remains as to why that execution failed to take place and for that we have no reasons, except that, like its successor, the Spanish Inquisition, Rome was a punctilious observer of the rule of law and the execution of a king’s family was not something to be taken lightly by anyone less than an emperor. A governor might have the necessary authority to carry out such an act, but we know that Paulinus was otherwise occupied in the assault on Mona. Thus whoever acted in the east was almost certainly overstepping his powers and a senior officer might reasonably be assumed to have stepped in to stop it.

These, then, are the written historical grounds for this book. The rest is built around my interpretation of the archaeology. One piece is relatively unaltered: a tombstone was found in Colchester dating from the period of the Boudican revolt. It was dedicated to a man named ‘Longinus Sdapeze’ who had fought with the First Thracian Cavalry. The tombstone and the wording thereon are almost exactly as described in the text.

For the rest, as ever, the fiction outweighs the fact although I have tried to build on a skeleton of what is known or can be inferred from the existing data. The structure of tribal society is my own, based around a relatively flimsy skeleton of archaeology and later records of Celtic Ireland, which was never invaded by Rome. One of the most concrete ‘facts’ is the annual calendar followed by Breaca and her people which is based on a Gaulish remnant carved on stone. For the Gauls, certainly, and I believe the tribal Britons, the day began at dusk so that night preceded day, and the year began at the start of winter on what is now called Samhain, or 1 November. The night before, 31 October, is still the time when the veils between the worlds are thinnest.

The depth and colour are added to the characters and their journeys by the dreaming, which drives and enhances their lives. As with the previous volumes, the dreaming of this book has mirrored my own dreaming and the journeys of those who have joined it. This has no particular basis in what we might call ordinary consensus reality, but is based on an increasingly concrete experience of various non-ordinary realities that impinge on it.

For those who enjoy exploring the geography of these things, the caves of Mithras in which Valerius meets his god are fictional, but the Passage Tombs in Ireland in which he comes to know himself are very real and are almost exactly as described. These seem to me to have been designed expressly as dreaming chambers, although by a civilization far older than the late pre-Roman Iron Age of these novels. The rest, as ever, is as possible now as it was then, if we only set our intent sufficiently clearly and open to the possibility that the world is rarely as concrete as we would like to believe.

The author’s website, http://www.mandascott.co.uk, carries details of contemporary dreaming workshops, recommended reading and other resources.

CHARACTERS AND PRONUNCIATION OF NAMES.

THE LANGUAGE OF THE PRE-ROMAN TRIBES IS LOST TO US; WE HAVE NO means of knowing the exact pronunciations although linguists make brave attempts, based on known living and dead languages, particularly modern and medieval Breton, Cornish and Welsh. The following are my best attempts at accuracy. You are free to make your own. The names of characters based in history are marked with an asterisk.

Tribal characters.

Airmid of Nemain - Air-med. Frog-dreamer, former lover to Breaca. Airmid is one of the Irish names of the goddess.

Ardacos - Ar-dah-kos. She-bear warrior of the Caledones. Former lover to Breaca.

Ban - Breaca’s half-brother, son of Macha. The ‘a’ is pronounced rather like the ‘o’ in bonfire. It means ‘white’.

Bellos - Belloss. Former slave boy of the Belgae, and companion of Valerius in Hibernia.

*Breaca - Bray-ah-ca. Also known as the Boudica, from the old word ‘Boudeg’ meaning Bringer of Victory, thus ‘She who Brings Victory’. Breaca is a derivative of the goddess Briga.

*Caradoc - Kar-adok. Lover to Breca, father to Cygfa and cunomar. Co-leader of the Western resistance against Rome.

Cunomar. Co-leader of

*Cunobelin - Koon-oh-bel. Father to Caradoc, now dead. Cun - ‘hound’, Belin, the sun god. Hence, Hound of the Sun or Sun Hound.

Cunomar - Koon-oh-mar. Son of Breaca and Caradoc. His name means ‘hound of the sea’.

Cygfa - Sig-va. Daughter of Caradoc and Cwmfen., half-sister to Cunomar.

Dubornos - Doob-ohr-nos. Singer and warrior of the Eccini, childhood companion to Breaca and Ban.