Dreaming the Serpent Spear (25 page)

He was not a warrior and the glass was not a shield, nor need it be. Softly, she said, “Speak to me. Whatever it is, I can hear it from you.”

He drew a long, unsteady breath. “Breaca of the Eceni, it would be the culmination of a life’s work to heal you.”

She wanted that. She had not known how badly she wanted it until she heard it said. Still, Theophilus was weeping.

She was a warrior, if no longer the best; she had never backed away from hurt. Through a cold dread that grew in her chest, she said, “But you can’t.”

“But it may take longer than you can give. The damage within you was not only done in one afternoon, however badly you were treated. Airmid knows this, and Valerius. To heal you now would mean undoing the hurts of a lifetime and that will not be easy or fast; the wounds are not only physical, and the ones to your heart and soul are deeper than anything done to your body. Have you spoken to Valerius, to ask how long his healing took? Does he even know it was done?”

Breaca had not considered that. Thinking back to her brother’s long tales at her fever-side, she said, “His father, Luain mac Calma, demanded a year of him, and he gave it.”

She knew herself gaunt and would not hide it behind the green glass. Carefully, she placed the beaker on the floor beside the well where it would not be knocked over and break. She felt oddly hollow, as if the gap in her soul had come to the front of her chest, and was wide open to the night.

“How long would you need?” she asked.

His face softened. He had no idea how like her father he looked. He said, “Luain mac Calma is Elder of Mona. He has resources we can only begin to imagine, but then your brother’s wounding ran deeper than yours, I think, and was different in its nature. If I say that I would need to be with you, waking and sleeping — particularly sleeping — in no other company from now until mid-summer and possibly beyond, would you give that much?
Could
you?”

He was not a strategist, but he had lived amongst military men all his adult life. He had seen the watchtowers burn and could count the fires of the war host as easily as any other man, and so estimate the size of her army. He knew the distance to Mona and the disposition of the legions. From all these things and more, he had known her answer before he asked the question. It was why he had wept.

Breaca stood in silence. After a moment, when the ache in her chest became leaden and too heavy to be borne, she sat down on the rim of the well.

Theophilus said, “I’m sorry. Wait here,” and was gone. She listened as the scuff of his feet on the stone faded to nothing. The oil lamp guttered and went out while he was away.

He tutted when he returned, and left again and came back with new light, which was, by then, unwelcome.

“My dear, oh, my dear—”

Breaca could weep after all, it seemed, and having started the tears would not stop, even when she was no longer alone, but held in the care of a foreign man, before whom it should have been easier to show weakness, but was not.

She heard his knees crack and the echo off the walls, then he was kneeling and his hands were round her shoulders, taking proper care of her back so that she tilted forward and her head was in the crook of his neck, smelling the sweat and the man-smell which was father-smell and the smokes of strange fires, and she could weep there, muffled by the white linen of his robes, and her tears, running freely, could merge into racking, bucking sobs as they had not done since childhood, and perhaps not then.

Her body heaved and she thought she might be sick and tried to find some control again, breathing fast and hard through her teeth.

“Breaca, Breaca…”

His chin was on her head, so that his voice filtered in through her hair. He patted her cheek and stroked it with his finger and when his hand came away wet and slimed with mucus he did not wipe it on the cloth at his belt. Instead, he held a beaker to her lips, a simple one of clay, not bejewelled glass, and tilted the contents to her mouth.

She tasted and drank and it was not poppy or vervain or houndwort or any of the others she feared. It hit her somewhere under her diaphragm and the sobbing started afresh. She held her breath, to try to stop it.

Theophilus shook her, like a father with his child. “Will you not let yourself be weak, even for this? Let go, woman. Weep if you need to weep; scream if you need to. No-one but me will hear it and if they do, they will think it
Peltrasius, or the ghost of Cunobelin, whichever takes their fancy. When did you last sleep? A proper sleep, not drugged or fevered or beset by dreams of war?”

A new voice said, “When she was twelve, I would think, before her mother died, although there might have been some nights on Mona with Caradoc, or more recently with Airmid, when she let herself forget.”

There was a silence, in which only the unsteady rise of her breathing could be heard.

Breaca said, “Valerius?”

He was somewhere out of sight to her left. She heard him with the same disembodied clarity as she had done in the fevers, but she was not fevered now, only drowning in despair. The lamp was all wrong and her vision was blurred with tears.

Her brother took her hand; she would never mistake his touch for anyone else’s. His fingers were cool and dry and steady.

He said, “My father spent a year working day and night on my healing, even when I did not know he was doing it. As Theophilus will tell you, I am not fully healed, but better than I was. If you want it, we can make that time for you.”

Breaca had control of herself again. Her brother’s presence had done that, or Theophilus’ draught, or simply time to breathe and to step back from the brink of the void that threatened to consume her. She pushed herself clear of both men and leaned against the wall beneath the newly filled oil lamp.

Valerius sat with his back to the mechanism of the well, watching her with the same tact he had used in the battle against the IXth and before that, when he had fought her
in the clearing by Briga’s altar, as if too much scrutiny might break her.

He might have been right. As one who has run to the point of exhaustion, she said, “Then who will lead the war host if I am gone for six months? Who will keep Cunomar in check and stop the she-bears from launching more assaults before we’re ready? Who will keep Cygfa alive long enough for her to lead the right flank if it comes to a full battle, when all her instinct is to kill and keep killing, whatever the risk to herself? Who will talk in council with the war leaders of the Coritani, of the Dobunni, the Durotriges, the Dumnonii, the Silures, the Brigantes, the Ordovices, the Atrebates if they choose to side with us? Who has exchanged gifts with them these past twenty years, who has given them guest-place at council fires and sat at theirs, who has led their people into battle and won for them so that they will join now and fight together, whatever the old tribal frictions? If you can give me a name that I can believe in, I promise you, I will be gone.”

Valerius was her brother. He sustained her gaze for longer than most men, and when he looked down, it was to pick up and study the glass beaker with the gems set at its rim. With the green light warping his fingers, he said, “No-one else can do all of that. I know of no-one else who would want to try.”

“Then why offer what you cannot give? Where is the kindness in that?”

“I didn’t say we couldn’t give it, I said it couldn’t be done by one person alone. There are people who can do each part of it if they have to: Cunomar is learning self-control and leadership, Cygfa is finding reasons to live beyond each battle,
Ardacos is devoted to the destruction of Rome, and he can talk to the tribal leaders. Each of these can play a part, but none of them is the Boudica, who can do them all and fire the warriors in battle to stretch beyond their limits.”

“Any one of you can do that.”

“No. I saw you fight against the Ninth and you were not as you should be, but still the warriors around you came alive. In your presence, they fight as one; without you, they are green youths, each fighting their own small battles. You don’t see this because for you it has been like this for years, but those of us who watch can see it, and can fear the moment when you break, and it breaks with you. It’s the Boudica that makes the war host what it is. We need you for that, Breaca, but we need you whole or we are broken with you. Not yet, perhaps, but soon, we will reach a time when having you with us in body, but not in soul, is worse than not having you at all.”

“Why has no-one said this before?”

“Arrogance?” He did not look arrogant. He looked like a man driven to the edges of his own being. “We thought we could heal you. And then we thought that being in battle would heal you. And then we thought that Graine going to safety would heal you. Even as late as today, we thought that Airmid, in and of herself, might heal you. We were wrong. What else is there to say?”

Theophilus was there, with a hand on her arm. She felt him as if her body belonged to a stranger. Her voice was empty. “Perhaps I needed to know this. If I were to take part in my own healing, could it be done faster? In a day? In two days? In ten? We could perhaps spare that long before we burn Camulodunum and all who are in it.”

Her brother pressed his thumb to a ruby. It came away with the imprint white in the flesh. He said, “To heal at all, you need first to understand what is lost and why. I know of no fast way that might be done.” He balanced the beaker with care on the rim of the well and looked up. “Theophilus? Do the physicians of Athens and Cos have an answer?”

“You could sleep for a night in the temple of Aesclepius, but that is half a year’s journey from here and in any case I doubt if it would suffice. Beyond that … I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can offer that will give the speed you require. I did not speak lightly: I will give six months of my life to your healing and think in that time I can do it. I know of no way it can be done in less.”

There was silence, and time to think, and to sift the possible from the impossible, and find a way to go on.

Theophilus was sitting still where she had left him with his knees drawn up and his elbows perched on them in a way that undid entirely the dignity of his white robes. Breaca came to stand, and then to sit, before him. She did not touch him, but was close enough to feel the quiet heat of his skin.

“That you can think of it, and are prepared to give it time, is a greater gift than I could have asked for. It is not your fault, or mine, that I can’t accept. We will both know that the will was there, and perhaps return to it one day. Meanwhile, I came to ask a different gift, one that is not impossible. The morning will bring war, if not this morning, or the tenth from now, then soon. Would you come with us to safety? Nothing will be asked of you; it is only that we owe you everything and would not repay it with death.”

“That, too, is impossible.” Theophilus shook his head. “I can’t leave here now. The hospital has three patients. By
tomorrow’s dawn, it may have more. I made an oath, once, never to abandon them. I would not break that simply to save my own life. If they all leave, or if it’s clear that by staying I can do them no good, then, yes, I will follow my apprentices to your camp, but that may not happen before you attack. We should be clear that the decision to stay is mine. I absolve you of all harm that may come of it, to me or my hospital.”

The screaming began again in the room above, rising in pitch and volume, as if the afflicted patient did not need to pause for breath.

Theophilus stood. “You see? How could I leave a man in such pain? You should go. If I can, I will join you. If not, then your gods, perhaps, will guide the outcome.”

He gripped them both along the forearm, hand to elbow, as warriors did before battle. His face was smooth with age and exhaustion, his eyes infinitely wise. “Whatever happens, I have lived well and my life has been richer for knowing you. I would not have it otherwise. Go, and build the war that you must and make sure that in winning it you each find a way to be whole, or all this is for nothing.”

T
HE GODS’ ISLAND OF MONA LAY LOW IN THE OCEAN. PALE
waves creamed its flanks and the sea ran thick as liquid iron in the straits that separated it from the mainland.

Dawn had not yet come. Graine lay on her belly in the un-light amidst colourless sea pinks and harsh, rimed grasses looking out to the place where water met land. The tide was on the ebb. Waves riffled up the shingle, a little further away each time. Periodically, she measured the distance from the frothing wavelets to the high-tide mark a hand’s span in front of her face where the storm of the last three days had rammed a broken crescent of bladderwrack and sea-aged oak and clear jellyfish with pale purple stars at their centres far above the rest of the shore’s detritus.

Time was measured by waves. In between was timeless and held its own peace. The pungent scent of sea and rotting weed seeped into her skin and hair; it lay ripe on her tongue and swelled the space of her lungs, drawing out forgotten memories of the time
before
, when she had lived on Mona, when she had been whole and the world had seemed safe,
when her mother had been the beloved of Briga, a warrior without match and invincible, when Rome had been a distant, faceless enemy to be defeated by the greater power of the Boudica and the gods, when the Boudica’s daughter had been the promised of Nemain, and had not ached in every part of her body from the assaults of uncounted men.

The pain was less than it had been; the sea’s healing had worked on the journey over, and that — the freedom and exhilaration of the ocean — had been the first surprise. Until she had boarded the ship sent by Luain mac Calma to fetch her, Graine had not known how much happier she was riding the prow of a bucking vessel than she had ever been, or was ever likely to be, riding the calmest horse. The journey from the far southwest toe of Britannia to the southwesterly tip of Mona had taken three days, the last two sailing hard into the teeth of a storm. Every slamming wave had been a challenge as great and as miraculous as the spear-trials of her brother and sister; they had made as nothing the bruises and tears of her body, showing how small were the assaults she had suffered when the vast, crushing power of the god was so great. At first, simply to face that force without terror, to stay still and accept what was thrown at her, had been challenge enough. Later, numbed and cold and exhilarated, she had learned to fight back, shouting and screaming into the power of the sea.