Dreaming the Serpent Spear (51 page)

He alone was able to look Bellos full in the face. He did so for an age and then nodded and said, “You can.”

“How? Can you carry us? I cannot see and the child cannot move.”

The deer-chief shrugged. His face showed a bored contempt. “You go or you die.”

Gunovar raised her hand and he flinched. She said, “You swore you would not harm the daughter of the Boudica.”

“We will not. But we cannot protect her if she is here. She is only safe in the valley with us. No man who stays at the crag head when the god comes can live.” He considered, and amended that, nodding to Gunovar. “Nor any woman.” Speaking towards the trees, he said, “If the Coritani wishes to meet his death cleanly, he, too, will come down with us. He cannot be concealed in the land of the Horned One.”

… to meet his death cleanly…

Hawk will not die.

Loudly, in Greek, because they had spoken it a little together on Mona and the deer-men were least likely to know it, Graine said, “Hawk, leave. Find the Boudica. Tell her what has happened.”

The deer-elder grinned, and seemed less human. He nodded, as if she had played her part right in a ritual of his making. He waited, watching the darkening sun, and the smile faded from his face long after his eyes had taken the red heart of the gods’ fire and drunk it in and made of it something older and less benign. At a certain point, when the sun’s light was almost gone, he lifted his head and barked, deep and low, like a stag at rut.

The trees moved, and there were three dozen deer-men where there had been nothing, and Hawk was in the centre of them, backed by unsheathed knives. Blood oozed from a line down one side of his face where they had cut him, so that he was red-striped as they were, in parody, or as a beginning.

Graine saw it and would not believe. A part of her stepped away, to become separate and so safe, as it had done when the rape began. She heard Bellos’ voice, clear as a wren’s. “Don’t go. He will need you to think and care for him. Keep safe and ask Nemain for help.” She did not know if he had spoken aloud or in her mind but it worked and she came back and felt sick which was better than feeling nothing.

The deer-elder saluted Hawk, and then Graine, linking them. He spoke to his own men in a tongue that was still the grunting of deer and then once more stepped to the edge of the crag. “We go down,” he said, thickly. “Those who need help will be given it.”

No-one, this time, spoke against him.

The descent was a nightmare, better not remembered; a precipitous climb in which white, crumbling stone kept Graine alive, and a man who was not one of those she had learned to trust pressed his body to hers, holding her into the rock
at the times when her foot slipped or a handhold proved insecure and she began to peel backwards away from the cliff’s face.

Her head swam and her guts rebelled, but Bellos’ words remained clear in her head so that she held the sight of Hawk in her mind with the single red knife-cut down his face and the power of that kept her moving and putting her feet where she was told and her hands gripped the rock and she did not become paralysed with fear as she might have done and there was an end to it after eternity, when she stood on flat ground, between two drooping birch trees, and clung to the deer-man and let him hold her until the shaking stopped.

By comparison, the climb up to the cave a short while later was easy. Bellos was helped by the deer-elder because the other deer-warriors would no longer go near him; he saw too much. Following these two, Graine scrambled over white rock and then up a small path that became a series of handholds carved into the rock and then a flat ledge wide enough to walk on that bent round a corner.

They came to the cave suddenly, as if it had moved out of hiding to reach them, not they it. The mouth gaped wide as a hunting bear’s, easily big enough to swallow them. Fronds of fern drooped over the arch, fringing it with green teeth. Bellos stopped, and then Graine. “The ancestors used this,” he said. “It’s older than the great-house on Mona.”

The deer-elder touched a hand to the rock, as if it were a thing of his own making, and he justly proud. “It’s older than even the grave mounds of the ancestors. There are bones of deer in this cave on which the year-marks have counted fifty generations and they were old before the marking began.”

It was impossible to imagine so much time. Graine said, “That’s older than Rome.”

The deer-elder looked at her and into her and seemed surprised at what he saw. He considered a moment and then stepped back and brushed a fern sideways so that they could see paintings on the wall of men with red-striped bodies and antlered heads.

“There were dreamers of deer here in the days before Rome was a village with three hens and a starving cow,” he said. His accent was less thick than it had been, as if he no longer needed to set himself apart. He spoke with the same quiet intensity as Luain mac Calma, or Valerius, or, less often, Breaca. “We intend that they shall be here, free to dream, when Rome is reduced to that again. You who fight with us are welcome. The cave will keep you safe in the dark part of the night before the moon rises.”

They were different as they entered the cave; less prisoners moving under duress, more participants in a rite that had not yet begun. Graine felt an itch in the clay-marked line on her brow as if it were newly made, still hot from the boiling pans. She followed Efnís through a limestone cleft smaller than the big caves of the west, and whiter, but still with room for a fire and the dozens who grouped round it.

The cavern opened out at the back, to make a wide, circular chamber. Two stag’s skulls adorned the entrance to this, one on either side, and on the arched limestone walls were paintings of stags and horses and hares and men who had become deer and danced to a painted fire.

A real fire was lit in the centre, far back so that its light barely reached the entrance and could not be seen from outside. Smoke filled the air, lightly: pine and green oak
and the singed hair of an animal. Already other deer-men sat in rings about it, too many to count.

Like deer, Graine and those with her were herded into the farthest corner and left. She sat on the floor, and leaned back on the wall and tried to bring her breathing back to normal. A youth came and offered them oat bannocks, seared to blackness on the fire.

Dubornos said, “They feast us. We should be honoured.” He sounded like Valerius; his voice had the same dry irony. She had not seen it before so clearly as a defence against fear.

Gunovar said, “This is god-food, to mark us for the Horned One. They will have killed a stag. We will all be expected to eat of it before moonset in the morning. I suspect it will not be cooked.”

“The fire is for other things?” asked Bellos, and was not answered.

Hawk came in last and did not sit. He stood with his back to the ragged limestone and stared out to the night beyond the cave’s mouth where a sudden, sharp storm had passed over and left the night cool and damp. Sometime in the descent, all their weapons had been removed. Hawk alone had been stripped. The knife wound ran the length of his body, from his hip to his shoulder to his brow. It bled as if newly done.

Graine shuffled across to sit closer to him. “Do you know what they’ll do?”

“To you? Nothing. They wouldn’t dare. Even here, the Boudica’s name is set next to the gods’.”

He had rested his shoulders on the wall. There was blood on it, from an equivalent line down his back. He was
slick all over with a light sheen of sweat and there was goose-flesh on his arms. Graine said, “I wasn’t asking about me. What will they do to you?”

“I don’t know.” Hawk looked down for the first time, away from the cave mouth and the night beyond it. “Our mothers tell us things when we are small, to make us squeal and grow big eyes and stay in the roundhouse until dawn. I believed them, of course, because all children believe their mothers, but then they told us similar things about the Eceni and I have not yet seen any of them to be true.”

He would not look her in the eyes. The bruise on his lip that came from Valerius’ knife was gone to a faint green so that Graine could not have seen it if she had not known where to look. It mattered less now than it had done.

He had been the best hawk-scout of his generation and Valerius had treated him as an arrogant hound whelp in need of training. The men of the horned god saw him the same. She thought that Valerius might have been right, but that the journey to Mona and all that had happened there had changed him so that now the deer-men were making a mistake. She was not certain that they would treat him any differently if they could be made to understand that.

Gunovar finished her bannock and wiped her fingers on her tunic. She said, “They will make him the Horned One, with paint and antlers, and have him dance with me, and mate at the end of it. If he will not dance, or refuses the mating, they will flay him and use his skin to cover one of their own who will do it instead. If he does as they ask, and dances well, they will kill him differently, and keep it short, so that his death fills only the time just after dawn when the sun and the horned moon share the sky.” She splayed her
fingers, so that they could see the scars where they had been broken. “It helps to know,” she said. “If I were you, I would dance when they ask it, and everything else. I will not hold it against you.”

Hawk’s head turned on his shoulders, smoothly, like an owl’s. “How?” he asked. “How differently will they kill me if I do as they want?”

“As they have started, with knives. Or with the fire. I believe you will be allowed to choose.”

“That’s what our mothers told us,” said Hawk. He sounded surprised, almost relieved. “You were right. It is easier to know.” He hesitated a moment, then sat down to join them, and accepted one of the burnt bannocks and let Efnís and Dubornos draw him into conversation about the cave and the way it had been painted and the talk drifted into other things and he did not go back to looking out at the darkness.

After a while, when nothing had yet happened but that more deer-men came and built the fire higher, he asked Dubornos and Efnís to help him braid his hair after the manner of the Eceni, with a warrior’s knot at the side and a single black kill-feather woven in at the temple. Efnís gave him a necklace to wear with amber beads carved in the shapes of dream-animals; six-legged bears followed wildcats with long teeth and otters that held snakes between their jaws. Bellos had an armband in bronze that sat well on Hawk’s arm and Gunovar took some red wool from the edging of her tunic and bound it about the quill of the feather to mark him as one who had saved others in battle at the risk of his own life. He looked quite different when they were done.

Dubornos said, “They want you as Coritani, not as Eceni.”

Hawk grinned. “Then they can change me. But they will know they have done it.”

The rite of the horned god began with three young women painted all in black spirals who played whistling pipes carved from deer horn that made low, fluted noises like night birds.

The music looped up and down, weaving laceworks of sound that encircled Hawk as a net circles the salmon, and drew him away from the others to stand by the fire. They made him stand in the north, the place of the hunter, of the warrior, of the horned god. The leader was the same one who had taken them in the beginning. He stood, and, for all his strength, was smaller than Hawk, and his hair did not gleam on his head, nor was the bronze of his skin set off by the armband of the same colour and the flowing amber about his neck. He bore no kill-feathers, red-banded or not, and was less for it, and must have known it.

Hawk said, “The Coritani worship the Horned One above everything except Briga. Even so, we do not send unwilling life to any god.”

“Nor do we. When you understand what we ask of the gods and they of us, you will embrace your death willingly. The music and the dance alone will make it easy.”

Three young men, painted in white lines, brought Gunovar to join him. She was lame from the Roman inquisitors and had done nothing to adorn herself and still she looked regal. With care, they removed the dreamer’s thong from her brow and gave her a neckband instead made of the backbones of deer.

The deer-warriors made a corridor, and two at the front took the skulls and tapped on them with bones to set up a rhythm, as the bear-dancers did on their skull drums, but less discordantly.

The elder took his knife and made a third cut on Hawk, who stood still and let him do it. The man stepped back and grunted and was half deer again.

“Outside. Everybody.” His arms swung wide. “All of us, from youngest to oldest, will dance to meet the god outside, under the stars and the horned moon.”

I
N THE LAND OF THE CORNOVII, ONLY ARDACOS COULD
travel safely.

The pathmakers of the Brigantes were fast and silent and left no trail but they did not see the scout who watched from a hillside. Ardacos saw him and found him and killed him and returned with a Cornovi knife, with a deer’s foot hilt, as proof. Breaca thanked the pathmakers and sent them back to Venutios.

Soon after that, Ardacos left his horse on open land where it could be found by others and went on foot, ranging from side to side on the rolling heath and into the open weave of the forest, leaving marks that only Cygfa could find. Breaca followed her lead, as safe or as dangerous as it might be; she could do nothing else, nor speed their travel. Miraculously, she felt herself free of all responsibility for the first time since she had come east from Mona to the lands of the Eceni.

It was an illusion, but she accepted the gift of its freedom and chose not to think deeply on what they were nearing, or
the failed quest behind, or the question that Venutios had offered as an unexpected, unwanted gift.

With Cygfa ahead and Stone at her heel, she rode fast on small paths, or no paths at all, heading south and a little west. The gritstone and heather moors of the meeting place became high limestone crags and deep clefted valleys with forest eaten at the edges by the axes of the legions, but not yet reduced all to farmland.