Ravens of Avalon (38 page)

“Of course he is.” Lately the dog had lost flesh, but he still probably weighed as much as one of the girls. Argantilla would have not hesitated to order the men to help them, but she could understand why the girl had stayed with the dog. She was always the one to whom people would bring a bird with a broken wing.

“If he is hurt he should be moved carefully. Run to the workmen who are building the palisade and have them use some of the poles to make a litter. Tell them it is my order,” she added when he looked dubious.

Leaving Temella to finish with the bed, Boudica sniffed the air, then took up her shawl and strode across the yard. The sky was now completely gray, and the air heavy with the promise of rain. She could have wished that Prasutagos had not designed the new rectangular enclosure to be so
big.
He could have fitted an entire Roman fort inside. The original bank and ditch had been filled in, and as each section of the new one was finished the woodworkers were adding the palisade, while the diggers extended the ditch some more.

As she hurried toward the far corner of the enclosure she glimpsed Argantilla’s fair head and then the sprawled, creamy limbs of the dog. Bogle lifted his head as she neared, tail twitching in welcome.

“Hello, old friend,” she murmured, kneeling beside him and settling the great head in her lap. “How is it with you?”

The dog gave a gusty sigh and closed his eyes as she began to fondle his ears. Boudica’s heart twisted in pity, feeling the bone beneath the loose skin. She had known Bogle was aging, but he was a white dog, and there was no graying at his muzzle to warn her just how old he had become.

“Where is the trouble then, my lad?” Gently she worked her hands along his spine, flexed the joints, probed the long muscles of back and thigh. The dog did not wince or move, except for the lazy beat of his tail.

“Mama, what’s wrong with him?”

Boudica shrugged helplessly. “I can find no injury, Blossom. I think he is simply old and tired.”

“Like Grandma got?” asked the girl.

“Yes, darling.” Boudica’s mother had died the year before, and in her last days Argantilla had been the one to keep her company. “Bodies wear out, for dogs and humans as well.”

“But he is only two years older than Rigana!” Tilla exclaimed.

“Dog years are different,” said Boudica. “For a big dog, Bogle is very old …” As old as her little son would have been, if he had lived. How strange that a dog’s whole life could have passed, when her baby’s death still seemed like yesterday.

It was getting cold. Where were the men with the litter?

“But I don’t want him to die …” muttered the child.

Beyond her, Caw’s face had grown very pale.
He has seen death,
thought Boudica,
and knows what it is. Do I?

When her mother died she had been away from home, and the shell that was left seemed unreal. If she had seen her son’s body, perhaps she would not have been haunted for so many years by dreams in which she heard him crying that she had abandoned him, or if she had felt his little life flicker out beneath her hand, as she felt Bogle’s life fl ickering now.

She bent closer, trying to soothe the dog as he twitched and shivered in her arms.

“They will have to be very careful when they lift him,” Argantilla was saying as Bogle stiffened, relaxed, and began to tremble once more.

“Oh my poor puppy,” Boudica whispered, “be at ease, be at peace. The fields of An-Dubnion are full of hares, they say, and Arimanes loves a good hound …”

Death had surrounded her in these years when the Romans had killed her brothers and so many other men, but she had always missed it. She had no choice but to embrace it now.

“You were a good dog, Bogle, a
good
dog …” she got out through an aching throat.
Thank you for all your love for me
…

The plumed tail slapped the ground. She held him tightly as he convulsed once more, and then was still.

“We have made a litter, Lady. Shall we take the dog to the house?”

Boudica straightened, acknowledging their presence, though at this moment she could not remember their names. She felt as if an age had passed.

“No. We must find a place to bury him,” she whispered, and Tilla began to cry. “Have the holes for the gateposts been dug?” When the men nodded, Boudica added, “We will lay him there, where he can continue to guard us, and carve his head upon the pole.”

Drops of moisture sparkled on the dog’s white coat and she thought it had begun to rain, but it was only her tears.

TWENTY

t Samhain, the doors are open between the old year and the new, between the living and the dead, between the worlds. This year, the new gate of Teutodunon was open as well, with torches set into the ground before the posts where the heads of the cattle sacrificed for the feast had been hung. The inner bank and ditch had been completed, though the palisade was still going in. Now Prasutagos had gotten the idea of adding another outer wall, with a forest of posts between them. Only the Good God knew how long
that
would take to build.

This was the season when the herds were brought in to the home pastures. Next week, when they began to cull those they could not keep through the winter, the scent of blood would hang heavy on the air. But now, as Boudica watched the sun fade into the west, the wind carried the smell of roasting meat and woodsmoke and the promise of more rain.

“Mother, what are you doing? We are waiting for
you!
” Rigana had just turned eleven and with every moon, it seemed, she grew taller. Along with the height came an apparent conviction that her parents were inferior beings who alternately annoyed and amused. Boudica told herself that the girl would grow out of it, but she recalled being much the same.

Well, Mama, you have your revenge,
she thought with an inner smile. And perhaps tonight her mother’s spirit would hear.

“Yes, dear, I’ll come now,” she said peaceably, and followed her daughter into the two-tiered hall.

Prasutagos was already seated in his carved chair on the other side of the fire. Her stool was next to his, but then came two seats that would be left empty for her mother and father. The king’s guard and the rest of the household were settling into their places. There would be empty seats there as well; one of the warriors had been killed when his horse fell, and the wife of another was dead bearing her child.

An ordinary year, she thought, not like the autumn after her marriage when half the feast had been set aside for Prasutagos’s brother and all the men killed at the battle of the Tamesa. If the gods were good, she would never see a Samhain feast like that again.

Prasutagos looked at her with a worried frown and she managed a smile. The feast was sacred, but most years it was not a time of sorrow. The Druids taught that the Otherworld was only a breath away from this one. The dead were not gone, and at Samhain, the veil between the worlds grew thin.

Now the food was coming in on wooden t renchers—bread and honey cakes and steaming barley, dried wild apples and ribs of beef and slices of roast boar. They had been brewing for weeks to get ready, and cups and horns were kept filled.

“I salute my mother, Anaveistl,” said Boudica. “Teutodunon has changed a lot since you were lady here, but I hope you are not too disappointed with our housekeeping!” That got a laugh from those who remembered her mother’s heroic bouts of spring cleaning. Boudica drained her cup, and the toasting went on.

She bit off the last bit of meat that human teeth could remove from a beef rib, reached down to give it to Bogle, then stopped, tears pricking in her eyes as she remembered why he was not there. But surely the dog had been as valued a member of the household as many of the others they were hailing—with a silent prayer she set the bone on the earth where he had so often lain.

The toasting continued, sometimes with a song or a story as the dead lived again in memory. But as the evening drew on, Boudica saw her daughters beginning to look more often at the open door.

“I think that someone wants to keep watch outside,” she said smiling. “Eoc Mor, will you go with them to the gate?”

And because she was listening, even before the girls came running back, Boudica caught the deep vibration of the distant drums.

“The White Mare is coming! The White Mare!”

The whole company poured out into the torchlit night. Overhead a few clouds were playing tag with the moon and a little fog was rising from the moist ground. Beyond the gateposts at the other end of the enclosure she saw a glimmer of light. It was not the great bonfire that burned beyond the gateway, for this light was moving. The misty air lent a quality to that brightness that made the hair prickle on her arms. It pulsed in time to the rattle of pebble-filled bladders and skirling of birch flutes and the throb of the drums. Boudica felt her heartbeat settling to that rhythm and laughed.

And now she could see the beings that bore those torches tumbling into the enclosure, masked and caped to mimic the animals that were the families’ totems, or fantastic creatures from the Otherworld. Capes and sleeves fluttered with streamers of colored wool and metal bits and clattering bones. Some had the shape of men, but had painted themselves like the warriors of the old race whose blood they bore. Some had no disguise but chalk paste that turned their faces to skulls from which eyes glittered with unnerving intensity.

And rising from the midst of that screeching, chattering mob was the White Mare Herself, the bleached skull poised with clacking jaw above the drape of the supple white hide. Copper discs had been set into the eyeholes, polished to catch the torchlight with a baleful gleam. This was not the lively, loving horse goddess whose mask Boudica had borne at the kingmaking. At Samhain Epona showed the face of Life beyond life, to which Death was the door.

At Samhain she walks with the Lady of Ravens,
thought Boudica,
and that is an aspect no one in her senses would ask to bear …

The invaders formed into a rough semicircle with the White Mare in its center and began to sing—

“Behold, here we are, Come from afar, Your gates, friends, unbar, And hear us sing!”

Each district had its own variation on the festival. Teutodunon had been Boudica’s childhood home, so it was for her to step forward with the reply—

“Wise ones, tell me true, How many are you,

And give your names, too That we may know.”

She probably knew the men who were responding, but through the masks their voices sounded blurred and strange.

“You must give us to eat Both barley and wheat, As the spirits you treat So shall you prosper!”

As the girls ran back to the house for the bannocks and ale, Boudica kept the interchange going. In a few minutes the food and drink were being distributed to the masquers.

“The White Mare will sing, The spirits will bring New life and blessing To everyone …”

The massive head dipped. Boudica stepped back, dizzied as if it were she who had drunk the ale, seeing not a horse skull and hide but the entire animal, limned in glimmering skin and bone.

“A gift from you gains a gift from me … What would you ask, Iceni Queen?”

Was she hearing that with her ears or with her heart?

“Give me back my little son …” she whispered in reply.

“He will return, but not to you. It is not through your children that you will gain immortality. But I will give you back your guardian.”

Then the crowd surged between them and the connection was broken. Blinking, Boudica found herself at the edge of the throng.

“My Lady—”

She turned and recognized Brocagnos, a boar-mask dangling from his hand. On his other side something white was moving.

“When you visited my dun last fall my white bitch was in season, and that dog of yours—well you can see the pup is the spit of him. I thought to keep him, Lady, but I think he belongs here …”

Boudica scarcely heard. “Bogle …” she whispered as a massive white head with a russet nose and one red ear appeared at roughly the level of Brocagnos’s hip. “Bogle,” she said again, “is it you?”

The silky ears lifted. Then, with a joyful bark, the dog launched himself into her arms.

he ripening grain in the fields around Danatobrigos rippled like an animal’s pelt in the cold wind that blew in each day at sunset from the sea. Prasutagos had gone down to Colonia for the annual meeting of the chieftains, but it was five years now since Boudica had accompanied him. She preferred to spend the summer here, on the land she had learned to love, where the girls, now ten and almost thirteen, could run as wild as the ponies they rode.

During the day she was too busy to miss Prasutagos, but when the shadows lengthened and evening began to steal across the world it had become her custom to whistle up the dogs and walk out to the track across the downs. There were a good half dozen of them now, old Bogle’s offspring by bitches all over the Iceni lands. After Brocagnos brought the young dog, others had gifted her with puppies in which his blood ran strong, and now her walks were attended by a frothing of white, red-spotted hounds.