Dreaming the Eagle (5 page)

‘No.’ She shook her head. He saw her teeth shine white on her lower lip. In some ways she was still a child. ‘It is not for me.’

For a moment he thought he was being offered a gift and pleasure welled within him. Then he saw the twin streaks of colour high on her cheekbones, stark against the white of her skin, and, crushingly, he understood. He stared at her in silence.

With obvious effort she said, ‘It is a gift for … the one who knew the owl.’

She was rigid, her voice a drawn thread. Her injured hand was splayed flat on the edge of his workbench, her whole body shivering like a leaf under rain. The vertical line of the frown was etched into her brow, so like her mother. She took a breath to speak again and he silenced her, reaching across the gap between them before it became an impassable gulf. Carefully, because it was clear she was near to breaking and did not want to do so, he wrapped an arm round her shoulder and folded her into him, drawing her down until they sat together in the shadowy corner behind the furnace where she had spent so much time as a child. He stroked her hair, talking to her as he would a newly gentled horse that might still take flight, the rhythm meaning more than the words.

As the rising sun warmed the frost from the grass and the hens roused themselves from their roost in the granary, she became less stiff under his touch and her breathing, although stilted, felt less forced. He moved her round so her back pressed on his chest and linked his arms in front of her.

With his face close to her hair, he said, ‘Breaca, I am sorry. I have spent all winter nursing my own pain and had thought you free of yours. We can talk of your mother, of course we can. We should talk of her. It is only her name we cannot say. Her spirit is still making its way across the gods’ river to the lands of the dead. It won’t reach the far side until we burn her bones at the start of winter a year from her death. Until then, she is finding her path and we should do nothing that might draw her back.’

‘She is already drawn back.’ Her body had stiffened again and her voice was wooden. ‘I have dreamed her. I said her name in my dreams and she came. She keeps coming.’

He had not expected that. Ice ran in his veins and he fought to keep himself from stiffening as she had. His mind groped for a response. ‘What does she say?’ he asked, eventually.

‘What she always said: that only the gods know the future and it is not for me to judge them; that I should not bear anger towards the Coritani, for they are not our true enemies. She said the council was right when they decided not to attack in the winter and that I should use my voice to warn against it when we meet again in the spring.’ She softened a little, letting her head tip back on his shoulder. ‘I don’t want to do that.’

‘No. But it would be a good thing to say, and they will listen to you. You are her daughter and will one day lead in her place. And you’re a warrior now. They respect you.’

‘I know.’

She spoke with a new and unexpected gravity. In killing her attacker, his daughter had made of herself a warrior and earned a place on the council ahead of her time. It was a thing unknown in living memory but it was not unique. Once or twice in the tales of the heroes and their deeds there occurred a child who had killed young and gone on to greater things. They had no singer - her mother had been that - but there were those who knew the tales and could speak them well and it seemed each one who rose to speak in the slow nights of winter had picked a tale of a young-made hero. Eburovic, who knew the tales they chose not to tell, of those who killed young and died young and left no-one to mourn them, had listened with mixed feelings and nursed his own thoughts. Only now, looking back, he saw the shadows that had gathered around his daughter.

‘Did your mother tell you to make the brooch?’ he asked. ‘Or the elder grandmother?’

‘No. It was Airmid’s idea. She understands.’

Airmid; the tall, silent, dark-haired girl, recently passed into womanhood and accepted as a true dreamer by the elders. In the autumn, before the Coritani attack, she had not been a special friend. That, too, had developed over the winter without his knowing. He reached up and lifted the brooch from the workbench and pressed it into her palm. ‘We could go this morning. If we ride now, we would reach the platform and be back before the morning is half over.’

‘I can’t. It’s dawn. I have to see to the grandmother. I’m late already.’

For two years, his daughter had served as eyes and limbs to the elder grandmother, taking the hardship from the old woman’s mornings and giving the strength of youth to her days. To be chosen to serve was a great honour but it was also a great constraint. He had watched with amusement, seeing his daughter settle into it as a half-broken colt settles into the harness, chafing at the ties and testing the limits. Of late, she had been more conscientious.

She began to pull herself to her feet. He felt something important slide away from him, like a fish in the river. Drawing her back into his embrace, he said, ‘No. Airmid was the grandmother’s eyes and limbs before you. This once, could she not be so again?’

‘Maybe.’ She turned to look up at him. Her face was wet but her smile was steady. ‘If she knew why.’

‘Will she be at the river?’

‘Not yet. She’s in the west house.’

‘I see.’ He did not ask how she knew. The west house was the place where the young women of childbearing age slept who had not yet taken a man. The young men of similar age slept in the south. The roundhouse in the centre was for families and the elderly. Eburovic felt another tradition sway in the storm of his family’s passing; it was not expected that a man visit the west house uninvited. This morning was, he believed, a time of exceptions. He stood, releasing his daughter. ‘I’ll go and talk to Airmid,’ he said. ‘You get the harness and catch the horses. I’ll meet you at the lower paddocks.’

They met as the sun touched the lower branches of the hawthorn tree in the corner of the field. Airmid had agreed to tend to the elder grandmother and the old woman had accepted the alteration to her routine. On the way through the compound, he picked up his good cloak and found Breaca had been before him, collecting her own and changing her old tunic for her new one, woven in the blue of the Eceni with a coiled pattern in a darker tone worked along the border. He fixed his sword on his back and gathered his spear and his war shield with its iron boss and the mark of the shebear poker-burned on the bull’s-hide surround. The extra weapons were not necessary but he had not travelled to the platform since it was first built and he felt a need to go in ceremony.

He walked up to the lower paddocks and found that Breaca, thinking with him, had caught the roan horse he rode to war and had spent her time cleaning the burrs and mud from its coat. Beside him, surprisingly, an iron grey filly with a flesh mark on her muzzle and an eel stripe down the centre of her back stood bridled and ready. He looked out across the paddock at the two dozen wellhandled horses, any one of which would have come readily enough to the call. Breaca flashed him a look that was both challenge and apology. ‘She will be good,’ she said. ‘Almost as good as the roan. She needs time before she comes to trust anyone.’

He could believe it. He would have sold the filly at the autumn horse fair but she had kicked the first few who came near her and the rest had kept their distance afterwards so that he had been forced to withdraw her unsold. He had turned her away for the winter, thinking to work on her when the ground hardened in spring. Someone had been there ahead of him. Smiling, his daughter said, ‘She hasn’t tried to unman anyone recently. If you lead the roan out first, you will be safe. She will follow where he goes.’

‘If you say so.’

They led the horses to the trackway that ran between the paddocks. Eburovic clicked the roan to a trot and ran alongside for a few paces. When the rhythm was right, he grabbed a handful of mane and made the warrior’s mount onto its back. In the height of the summer, with some time to practise, he could do it fully armed with his sword free in one hand and his spear in the other, knowing that if he misjudged his timing he would kill himself or maim a horse he loved. Now, it was enough that his sword was in its sheath on his back and his spear hand also held his shield. He settled in the saddle, moving the shield to his arm. The blood rushed in his ears and he heard within it the sound of hoofbeats hammering the earth behind him. Spinning the roan, he saw the grey throw herself into a canter. He was reaching down for the bridle, ready to head her off, when he saw Breaca, running on the spear side, reach up for the mane. She was wrong-sided and wrong-footed - and she mounted with perfect timing. The smile she threw him then was a reflection of the morning. He found himself grinning back even as his horse matched hers at the canter. ‘Can you do that with a spear in your hand?’ He shouted it over the drumming of hooves.

‘I think so.’

‘Here, then.’ It was his war spear, slimmer and lighter than the boar spear she had killed with but with a longer reach and a blade honed to pierce metal. He tossed it across the gap, keeping the point high. She caught it one-handed and slid to the ground, ran for three paces, then, using the spear as a lever with the butt end planted briefly in the turf, vaulted back up. The grey never broke stride. Eburovic smiled and made a gesture of approval. Breaca laughed and spun the spear in the air and then, just for the show of it, she did it again on the shield side. Eburovic watched and tried to recall whether she had been able to do it like that before the winter. He believed not. Thinking back, he tried to remember if he had been able to do it on both sides at the age of twelve, the age she was now. He was almost sure that he had.

The grey was not battlehardened. The feel of the spear whistling, close to her head pushed her into a gallop. They ran free for a while, drawing the horses in the fields on either side to race with them, then curved in a circle and pulled back down the paces to a walk. It was the first ride of the spring, and it did not do to press the horses too hard. Eburovic dropped the reins and let his mount pick the way, feeling the glory of the morning. He had spent the winter existing, not living. Today, for the first time since the autumn, he felt glad to be alive. The air was bright and sharp, cold enough to crisp the hairs in his nose as he breathed in, but not so cold that it stiffened his fingers. Around him, spring was breaking the grip of winter. The first catkins hung on the willow, dusted with frost. Birch trees bore new leaves, unfurling them before the rising sun. Whitethorn flowers, tight in bud, scattered the hedges like the last remnants of snow.

The horses were losing their winter coats. The roan walked with his head up and his ears pricked, the way he walked to war. The filly nudged up beside him and did not roll her eyes when Eburovic leaned over to scratch mud from her neck. Breaca moved her on until they rode knee to knee. She was more sober now, not stiff with shock and the aftertaste of dreams as she had been in the forge, but neither was she showing the wild exuberance of the early gallop. There was a sense of containment to her that was new to him. He thought of the warrior’s mount she had made and the neatness of it. His daughter of a year ago would not have put in the hours of practice needed to get the timing right. It brought to mind the furnace she had built in the forge, with the edges banked high to turn the heat inwards. Before her mother’s death, she had been a blazing hearth fire, sparking at random with a vivid, careless joy. Now, she could melt her own core if she chose to. The image nagged at him, taking the edge from the morning. He turned it over in his mind. Too often, he had seen what happened to a vessel stoked over-hot, or a mould poured without air vents. Eburovic rode in silence beside his daughter and made a silent prayer to the gods that she would find a way to let out the fire before it consumed her.

The horses nodded on. Eburovic guided the roan with his knees, remembering. The last time he had come this way he had been on foot, supporting Graine, walking at her side, fearful that the child might come before they reached the place he had made for her. She had smiled her singular smile and promised him it would not and, because it was her second, he had tried to believe her. Breaca had still been a child then; she had run on ahead, searching the paddock edges for late mushrooms, bringing them back to him in dirty handfuls. Graine had taken them, and later had found room in a different pouch for the strange-shaped pebble that might, from certain angles, have looked like a lizard’s head and the dried casting from an owl that showed the bones of what it had eaten. Both of those had stayed with her body afterwards, making playthings for the crows.

The sun was warm on his right shoulder as they reached the ruins of the birthing hut he had made. The roofing had been taken down within days of the attack and the winter had seen to the rest. He followed his daughter as they rode past it in single file and then left the trackway, cutting right, towards the spinney that reached up the slope on the eastern side. When they reached it, they turned right again, to follow its margins.

Graine’s bones lay on the platform south of the spinney. She had died with a spear in her hand and the little owl had been her soul’s guardian. Eburovic could imagine nothing better as a death gift than the brooch his daughter had made for her. He forced himself to think of it, imagining the shape of the mould, the carved imprint of the lines and the way it had looked when she broke the mould open; anything that meant he did not have to think about where he was going. Breaca rode on ahead of him, straight-backed, with her hair lying like a fiery cloak around her shoulders, and it was impossible to know what she was thinking.

They reached the place midway through the morning. The sun shone from behind, throwing short shadows that pooled at the horses’ feet. An easterly wind blew lightly, lifting tatters of blue wool on the platform. On their arrival, a magpie and two jackdaws lifted themselves lazily and moved to a nearby branch. They made no noise. Without speaking - he could not, at that moment, have spoken - Eburovic dismounted and led his horse forward. Breaca pushed the grey to the base of a post. She was not tall enough to see on top of it. He was about to offer a hand when she reached up to the crosspiece and, with an ease that spoke of many repetitions, hoisted herself up, keeping her balance with the tip of one foot on the filly’s rump. Like that, she could stretch forward and lay her brooch where she wanted. He saw her lips move but did not hear the words. He turned the roan and walked it away, feeling his gaze an intrusion. She jumped down and rode across to him shortly afterwards. He searched her face and her eyes, looking for signs that the dream had broken, that she had drawn it out as the grandmother had said she should. She smiled then and nodded and he let her be. They rode back again in silence. The wind moved round to the south and the air became heavy. In the distance, thin, grey clouds promised rain.