Dreaming the Serpent Spear (55 page)

It was older than the death the deer-elders had planned for Hawk, and honoured more gods. Bellos let out his breath
again in a long, soft hiss. “Well done. Very well done.” He said it quietly; Graine did not think she was meant to hear.

Efnís nodded and ran his tongue across his teeth and said, “Who should do it?”

Graine had not thought he might be given that choice. The stone she had found weighed suddenly heavy in her hand so that she wanted to drop it, or throw it away, but could not. His gaze swung to his right, where she stood among the others, and her heart stopped in her chest, then began again, crashingly, as he smiled for her and his eyes said goodbye and his gaze moved on and rested on Cygfa, who turned white as the moon and seemed not to breathe for the long moment it took for him to speak his wordless farewells there, too, and then passed on to linger more briefly on Hawk and to exchange the odd shared look with Bellos’ blind gaze and then the elders and Gunovar and so it was obvious, because he came to her last, whom he would choose.

He did not kneel, although the thought was there, only stepped forward to face the woman who stood a little apart from the rest, and had done so from the beginning, the one who had run just behind him all the way from the dancing ground, who stood there now, with her back to the rising sun, gathering all the light of day and night so that she stood balanced exactly on the borderline of both, and held them both, and was them both, shiningly.

With all that he asked and offered free to be read on his face, Dubornos gave the warrior’s salute of the Eceni and said, “Breaca, would you do this for me?”

She heard him speak her name through the soar of the dawn in her head.

She saw the radiance of his face and could not understand why she had never thought him beautiful before. More than a man in love, more than a winner of battles, he encompassed peace and the astounding grace of a life lived to its utmost. She matched his salute and knew that if the deer-elders had seen him thus, they would never have chosen Hawk to carry their plea to the god.

More gods than only the Horned One of forest and night stood around them, so that the air was pregnant with their waiting. The pressure of that and the rising crescendo of the dawn, as of a storm that comes to breaking, filled her head and made it hard to think.

“Don’t think.” Dubornos was with her, close as a shield-mate in battle, a partner in the ultimate dance. “Only act, Breaca. It is not for us to think now.”

Efnís was there, and Gunovar, and the beautiful gold-haired blind youth from Mona so that she was caught in an arc of dreamers. Then Graine stepped amongst them, her face smooth in its seriousness. She carried a stone the shape and size of an eagle’s egg between her two hands and offered it up.

Breaca could not move.

Dubornos took it. “Thank you. That’s perfect.” He was moon-blind, his eyes wide and black. He found Breaca’s hands by feel and pressed the cold stone into it. “That is the first gift of your daughter. You need a cord or a thong for the second.”

She had one round her neck, bearing the Sun Hound’s ring. She waited for someone amongst the hundreds to come forward with something better, but they were all naked and had nothing to offer.

The ring fitted her. She had not expected that. She untied the two ends of the thong and wrapped the whole round her left hand. Graine’s rock lay cool and heavy in her right.

The dawn roared, as a storm near breaking. The horned moon sang a single lofting note. Somewhere in the balance between these two was a gap, a gateway when the light of each was even on the earth, when night was perfectly matched by day. Through such a gateway, a man might step who had the need and the desire, who was clearly focused in his intent to greet the gods and they open in their welcome, forewarned of his coming.

In the language of the ancestors, old as the stone, Dubornos said, “Breaca, it must be now, or we have lost the time.”

Others sang it, who were not human. The noises converged and made a space of silence in which, blessedly, it was possible to think, and so, finally, to act.

They stood on the edge of the bog. Breaca held Graine’s stone in one hand. Dubornos placed the thong round his own neck. The moon held them: all-night, all-power of the dark and the unseen and the unspoken. Then the dawn moved on and the rush of its beginning, of all beginnings, of new day and new life and new hope carried them to the place where day and night, beginning and ending, life and death were exactly even, and they were needed, one stepping into life, one into death, to keep that balance.

“Hold me,” he said, and she held him.

He was naked, but for the tab of vixen’s fur round his upper arm. She felt the brush of it between her breasts, damp with his sweat and hers. She breathed in the smell of his hair, his skin, his breath. She felt the drumming of his
heart, far steadier than her own; his pulse, leaping as the deer leaps, as the salmon, from one heartbeat to the next, the urgency of it, the joy. She felt the surety of his intent, the sudden, certain settling into focus, and heard him.

“Breaca, now. Please.”

With the stone, she broke his head. The egg fitted the curve of her palm. Its weight cracked open his skull. His spirit broke free of his body. He was heavier in her arms.

With the cord at his neck, she cut off his air, that his breathing might stop, as it had once started when the cord was cut from his mother.

Last, she lowered him with all care face down into the bog that he might return to the water whence he came, and the embrace of the earth beneath it. To her left, the dawn, so long delayed, soared into being.

Thank you.

His soul spoke from beyond earth and water. He shone. His eyes were the moon and the sun. Peace hung about him like a cloak, and the certainty of where he must go. Already, he was moving, backing away from her on the shining path the new sun made for him. He said,
I know what we need. With all my soul, I will ask for it.

She could not speak. Her throat closed over the words and the air as if a second cord had been hers. He said,
Don’t grieve. It was the best of deaths. The gods approved it.

She felt that; the pressure of waiting, of watching, was gone and in its place was a quiet gratitude. The air weighed less heavily on her skin. The gateway she had seen between the dawn and the night lay open. Briga was there, and Nemain and the other, older gods. She saw the ancestor-dreamer and the Sun Hound woven together and a piece
fell into place in her soul, that made sense of them both, and herself.

What had become of Dubornos said,
I should go.

“Yes.”

Still facing her, he backed away, faster. A river came, where there had been none, and nine stepping stones across it. Ninefold hazels drooped to the running water. A crow sat on each branch. A stag waited, full-pride, at the water’s edge. It raised its head and bellowed. Dubornos turned and began to run.

She had seen so many men and women fall on the battlefield and wander lost after. Never had she seen one pass without help to the river and across it. She stood a long time watching after he had gone.

“Mother?”

She thought it might be Graine. It was Hawk, naming her mother for the first time. Graine was with him, and Cygfa on his other side. She had four children, where before there had been but three. Another one added to her lineage, another to help preserve the land. It was easier to think like that than to weigh one more in the balance of Venutios’ question.

“Would you like to eat?”

The smell of roasting deer sighed through the lightness of the moss and the bog myrtle and the blood from Dubornos’ head. She was crouching beside him still, locked in place. Her hands were on his body, which was cold. She had thought she was standing. She stood now. Her knees cracked and were slow to unbend.

Dubornos lay face down as she had laid him. The fox fur on his arm was black with the water. His hair was the
same colour. Since his boyhood, it had always been thin. It seemed thicker now, floating out around his head to weave into the moss.

“Mother?” This time, Graine said it.

“No. Actually, yes, I would like to eat. Thank you.”

They brought her food and she ate and came slowly back to the morning. The sun was far higher than it had been, the moon a pale ghosted sickle, already dropping down to the west. She sat on a rock and let the sun warm her skin and tried to come away from the sense of him stepping over the last stone into nowhere.

A young man came to sit by her, with striking blond hair and eyes that did not focus on her face. She remembered him in the dance, but not what he had done. He said, “I’m Bellos, once of the Belgae. Your brother, Valerius, who was Bán, brought me from Gaul and made of me a dreamer on Mona. It was I who called your daughter to the island and I return her now. The Elder, Luain mac Calma, believes her to be the wild piece of the Warrior’s Dance. He sends her back, with his wish that you and she find healing together.” His gaze sharpened, disconcertingly. “Last night, I thought you healed.”

“And now?”

“Now … You have passed beyond that. Can you see where you must go?”

She remembered a number of the things Valerius had told her about this young man, and saw the things that he had not. She said, “Not clearly. Never that. Only that we must be where the legions are, and that they are moving south. They are our bane. Their destruction is our salvation, or not, if we fail. Whatever happens can happen in their company only.”

Sûr mac Donnachaidh was near, eating meat from a rib. He had aged in the night. His eyes searched her face. “Ardacos could take you, but he might lose a day in finding their trail. My scouts have been watching the legions’ progress, and those who hunt them.”

A number of youths gathered behind him who had not been present in the night. They wore knife belts, where their peers were naked, and clay paint was smeared on their faces and in their hair, making them things of the soil. He said, “If you will take our horses and your own, you could reach them by nightfall. Your son and the Warrior of Mona have brought a thousand spears and are tracking them close behind. They will attack soon, before you can get there. They are outnumbered, but they hope to use surprise, as it was used before. I think they will not succeed.”

The dark thread in the weft took shape and form and size. Under the sun, the day felt cold. She sent a prayer to Dubornos and felt him gather it close, as she might gather a child.

She said, “Then if your scouts can take us, we will ride whatever you have to offer.”

S
UN ON SUN ON SUN ON POLISHED METAL, MAKING MORE
sun, blindingly.

Corvus rode south, at noon in the height of hot summer, with two legions of infantry marching in full armour ahead of him and a cloud of flies feeding about his face.

He wanted to bandage his eyes, to take away the glare. He wanted to stuff cotton in his ears to dull the hammer of nailed feet and the clash of harness and the interminable bloody marching chants of the cohorts, for ever out of key. He wanted to slay every fly in the province and then drink unceasingly of cold water from mountain streams that splashed down through dim valleys to pools where only moonlight reached. He wanted to be back on the straits by Mona, or in the fortress of the XXth or in Camulodunum, even if it had burned. He wanted to be anywhere, but not on an open road with legionaries marching six abreast in double time ahead of him and a baggage train moving almost, but not quite, as fast, and himself the teeth in the serpent’s tail at the back, to make sure the rear guard could
bite when — not if — it was attacked. He regretted ever having devised that strategy, and loathed the man, whosoever he might be, who had told the governor of it and encouraged him to use it now.

The heatwave was in its third day. The memory of the storms was gone from the men and the land. The flies were unspeakable and he chose not to think of them. Almost as bad was the gritty dust that clogged the air and settled on the mane of his bay battle mare and her harness and filtered through into Corvus’ neck and his waist and his groin, abrading them steadily so that already he could feel the ooze of blood where his belt sat over his mail. He checked his saddlecloth for the hundredth time and made himself believe his favourite battle mount was not being similarly damaged.

He drank from his waterskin and poured a little onto his palm and wiped his face, then leaned forward and rubbed his damp hand between the mare’s ears, batting away the flies and murmuring to her all the while. “It’s past noon. The worst is over. Walk steady and all will be well.”

He had taken to talking to the mare for the past two days, since shortly after the governor’s small party, riding north, had met the legions marching south with the remainder of his wing, the Quinta Gallorum, as escort.

The meeting had been welcome on both sides and the reunion joyful, but within a day Corvus had run out of things to say to Sabinius, who carried the standards and had led the wing in his commander’s absence. The mare, on the whole, was more rewarding to talk to. She did not contradict him and rarely answered back while Sabinius was very likely to do both. He had been escorting infantry in
hostile territory for nearly twenty years; he knew exactly how long the day was, and that the worst almost certainly was not over.

The standard-bearer grunted now and narrowed his eyes to peer through the shimmering heat haze ahead. He said, “You have never told me how far south we are going to march. If Vespasian’s Bridge and Verulamium are both destroyed, then there is nothing left to reach.”

“That’s because I don’t know. I don’t think Paullinus knows. We can perhaps march to the west of the bridge and find another way across the river but I can’t imagine we’ll reach it. We face a rebel army that best estimates put at fifteen to twenty thousand warriors and we are less than seven thousand strong. Where we meet them is largely academic, I think, only that we must, and that if we march like this, so their scouts can see us from half a day away, without ever needing to come within range, then we will call them to us and won’t have to go looking for them. Paullinus will have his final, glorious battle.”