Dreaming the Hound (19 page)

Breaca said, ‘Eneit, that was the best first throw I have ever seen and I taught the warriors for ten years on Mona. Anyone can throw at twenty paces with accuracy. Not everyone can hold themselves still for a thousand heartbeats before they do it, nor let the song of the spear free with such grace. It was beautiful, truly. If we

practise like this every day for a month, you will be able to hold still for a morning and cast at forty paces.’

Eneit’s brown eyes grew wide as pebbles. ‘Do I have to do that in the spear-trial?’

‘If we follow the rites of the ancestors exactly, the cast is at fifty paces and there are crow feathers hanging from the neck of the spear to catch the air and twist the path of its flight. The elders are unlikely to make you wait for a morning but in the world of battle, the Romans might easily do so.’

Breaca spoke for Cunomar as much as for Eneit. Her son had watched the trial with a growing sense of disquiet, as if it were both meaningless and unnecessarily difficult. A winter in Eneit’s company may have mellowed his temper, but his patience wore thin as quickly as ever, and he still lived and breathed for the right to sit his long-nights and the spear-trials that were part of the ceremony.

She said, ‘If you were waiting in ambush and the enemy were delayed in coming, you must keep your mind clear and ready, through rain and insects, gales and the close or distant deaths of your shield mates until they reach you. This is why the tests are set as they are; we wouldn’t ask of you anything that would not be asked in battle.’

‘Father won the spear-trials of three different tribes. Did he have to wait half a morning for each?’

Cunomar had retrieved the thrown spear and brought it back. He stood close by, turning it over in his hands, seeking the soul that Eneit had so readily found.

Breaca said, ‘In the spear-trials, as in battle, each time you throw is the first time and the last. Your father was different because he requested the right to sit the tests with three tribes. Most of us are happy to pass them once.’

‘But in the winter tales, Dubornos says that you were never called on to sit the spear-trials. Is that true?’

‘It is. I had already killed, as had Cygfa; the warrior-trials were not required of us.’

She knew the mistake as the words passed her lips and regretted it. Cunomar’s pride, always a fragile thing, cracked on the rock of his half-sister’s fame.

His lips set in a thin hard line that had nothing of his father

about it. ‘I have killed,’ he said. ‘Ardacos keeps the tally so that I may wear the kill-feathers one day, when such a thing is no longer “illegal”.’ He spat the word, as an insult to all who had allowed Rome to set and keep the laws.

He was her son; if he was arrogant, or ignorant, she had helped to make him so. Knowing it, Breaca said, ‘You have not killed with a spear. The ancestors’ rites do not allow kills with a knife or a sword-blade to exempt the child-become-adult from the warrior’s trials.’

As did all of the she-bears, Cunomar hunted with his knife; it was part of their courage, to reach close enough to the enemy to kill with a short blade. It was also the reason the boy had survived this long; in the heat of battle, he was always shielded, left and right, by others sworn to the bear and those he killed were distracted. To fight with a spear, one against one, would have killed him. No mother could say that, only let the silence read it and wait.

Cunomar did not listen to silence. He said, ‘So, then, let us see if the ancestors find me as acceptable as Eneit.’ He picked up the second spear, made for his height and his arm. The haft was of dark yew and the butt-weight of burred hazel. The marks of the she-bear ran the length of the blade. Very carefully, staring straight through his mother, he paced an additional ten paces back from Eneit’s stance.

‘I have killed boar with a spear before,’ he said, ‘Ardacos taught me. It wouldn’t be fair to Eneit if I threw from as close as he did.’

‘Cunomar, it’s not about—’ Eneit stopped. He had lived through the winter as the foil for his friend’s anger; he knew as well as anyone the futility of reason when pride was in the way. He pursed his lips and shrugged and said, ‘Think of the wild geese we watched yesterday and the way they flew. It helped me to quiet the voice in my head and hear the soul-song of the spear.’

He was wise beyond his years and cared deeply for Cunomar. Once, a long time ago, in another context, the elder grandmother had said, ‘It is the care of others that makes a man.’ If anyone could achieve that, Eneit could. Breaca prayed for them both.

Cunomar had already set his feet for the throw and found the balance point of the spear. Every bone-hard angle of his body said that he wanted no help from his mother. Nodding for Eneit to follow her, Breaca backed out of the clearing, leaving her son to seek the quiet at the centre of his soul.

He was no less rigid a thousand heartbeats later when she returned. His face was set hard, the lines of his nostrils white with

tension. His eyes were narrowed as if the sun pierced the mind behind them. When Eneit trod on a dried leaf, crinkling it underfoot, Cunomar twitched as if stung by a wasp.

There was no point in waiting further. As she had for Eneit, Breaca stood a spear’s length behind and said, ‘Throw,’ and knew before she spoke that it was too soon, or too late, or that the time would never have been right.

Cunomar threw as if his life depended on it. The spear hurtled forward, in a long, flat line, screaming a little in the wind of its own flight, as a sword may, if swung fast. The tip tilted slightly up so that from the first it was clear that it was not going to hit the straw, but it flew straight and hard and glanced off the rawhide rope by which the straw sack was suspended, so that the target spun dizzily on its own axis.

‘Yes!’ Jubilant, Cunomar punched the air. ‘I aimed for the rope, truly I did, mother. The sack was too easy, but the rope was a warrior’s—’

He stopped. Breaca was the smith and she could hear the death song of her spears as they died; long before her son had turned, her face was schooled into something close to approval and warmth.

Eneit was less practised in hiding the river that ran beneath the surface of his being. Looking at him, Breaca’s son met a barely suppressed horror where there should have been congratulation and joy, and his own face fell.

‘Eneit, it’s all right. I’ve practised with the spear for years. I can teach you as well as mother can. If we try every day for a month we’ll teach you how.’ Numbly, Eneit said, ‘It’s broken.’

‘Is it? That’s good. I thought it only touched as it flew past. But we can get more rope. We’ll need another anyway if we’re both going to try. Pick up your spear and we’ll both try again.’

‘No. Cunomar. You can’t try again. Your spear is broken.’

Eneit was the son of a dreamer. He had been raised in a land in which dreaming was forbidden on pain of crucifixion, but still he knew the pathways of the dream and the inner core of the ancestors’ teachings in ways most youths of his age did not. ‘The spear is your soul,’ he said gently. ‘We need to take the pieces and heal them, else your own heart will break.’

A year - half a year - before, faced with this, Cunomar would have turned his own pain into anger, guilt into recrimination, disappointment

and damaged pride into the acid, biting sarcasm that drove others from his company.

Breaca watched the first waves of that rise in him; he stared past Eneit to his mother and the blame was hard in his eyes, all of it hers. ‘Cunomar—’

There was no need to say anything more. Of his own accord, her son had lowered his gaze. He stared a while at the forest floor, frowning. When he looked up, for the first time the man who might one day hear the soul-song of his spear shone clearly through the child who never could. He lifted the two parts of the broken blade and held them out. ‘Can it be mended?’ he asked.

Thank you! Breaca said it silently to the soul of her son, to the listening mind of the ancestor-dreamer, to Nemain, to Briga, to whomsoever watched and listened and understood the magnitude of what had happened.

Aloud she said, ‘Of course. It may take me two days, but I can remake the blade. I’ll make it stronger next time, so that it can break open a rock.’

He nodded, still unsure of his ground. Where Graine or Cygfa might have lost themselves in the broken blade and its meaning, Cunomar’s attention had already passed on to the promised goal.

‘What will we do while we wait?’ he asked. ‘If we’re to sit our long-nights by midsummer, we can’t waste the time now.’

He was her son. What she had made, she could not change, only help him to build on the foundations he was given.

Nodding, Breaca said, ‘You are of the she-bear. You could teach Eneit the ways of tracking. And you could continue to practise with the wooden blades. Keep in the forest and be sure you’re not watched. Lanis will have your hides if she finds you and she is a better tracker than most Romans. If you can keep clear of her, you’ll be safe.’

The crack of striking blades splintered back and forth across the clearing, rousing the roosting ravens. The power of the impact shivered up Cunomar’s arm, numbing it. He dropped his guard, dragging a breath pointedly through his teeth.

‘Eneit, wake up. You need to raise your blade higher and hold it directly across the line of the cut. If I had a real blade, you’d be dead.’

‘Not if I had a real one too.’ Eneit grinned blithely. ‘Then I’d

have blocked you - here - and you’d have been off-balance and I’d have come in like this—’ He thrust forward and flicked the tip of his blade deftly upward under the rib cage. Cunomar doubled over, choking.

Eneit stepped back out of range, his brown eyes alight. ‘See? That’s a kill.’

He stood with his hands on his hips, grinning. Two days had passed since the ill-fated spear-cast and they were young. If the shadows of fate worried Eneit, he kept it well hidden. In the heart of the forest, facing his friend, he balanced evenly on his feet, his eyes bright with the promise of victory.

Cunomar drew his first full breath since the strike. On the second, he stood up and let his hands fall from his belly.

Eneit blazed a smile. ‘Good. I thought you really were dead there. Come on. We’ve hardly started. That’s one kill each and mine was a real one; yours was only pretend. I challenge you to the best of five strikes - real fighting this time, not half-baked training.’ He raised his wooden blade in salute.

It was a good offer. Three days ago, Cunomar might have accepted but the first lessons of the spear-cast were growing within him, showing that place within himself where rash foolishness took the place of true courage. It was a fine line, and not always certain, but he felt it now. He shook his head. ‘No, we should stop. It’s past dawn; someone will hear us.’

‘You mean, my mother will hear us and you’re afraid of her.’

‘Eneit, any sane man would be afraid of your mother. Ardacos is afraid of your mother and he faced down a she-bear defending her cubs. You and I are not yet bear-dancers and even when we are, I think we will tread carefully in the presence of the raven-dreamer who gave you birth.’

Cunomar stooped and slid his wooden sword into an oiled cloth roll at the side of the clearing. He had spent half the winter carving it and was proud of the result. For length and balance, it mirrored his mother’s serpent-blade but for the blank space at the hilt which would be filled when he had sat his long-nights and found his dream. Eneit’s blade, which had been made first, as a gift, was slimmer and had a crack already along one edge of the blade. It, too, awaited a mark on the pommel.

Eneit was not ready for the morning to end. ‘Did you ever hear of Sinochos, the warrior who was Dubornos’ father?’ he asked.

‘How could I not? He fought with mother at the invasion battle, and then won honour a second time at the battle of the Salmon Trap when the Eceni defeated a whole century of Romans and two wings of their Gaulish cavalry. I could sing the songs of his battles in my sleep. I probably do.’

‘Not that I’d noticed.’ Eneit found a green twig and chewed on it, cleaning his teeth with the frayed ends. ‘Did you hear how he died?’

‘Sinochos? I didn’t know he was dead.’ The wrapped blades lay snug in a pit at the side of the clearing. Cunomar crouched and began to back-fill the hole with the sand that made the forest floor and the black, friable loam that topped it.

Eneit chose his words with care. ‘It was after the battle of the Salmon Trap. Sinochos and his honour guard came home and found that the Romans were breaking everyone’s swords to stop them from being warriors. Sinochos saw the beginnings of slavery and swore not to live under it. He took his three best warriors with him and hid the blades that had been in their families for seven generations. Then he went back to the village and fought the Romans with his bare hands. He killed three before they hanged him.’

Cunomar rocked back on his heels, staring. ‘Sinochos hid the blade of his ancestors before the Romans could break it?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘And you are telling me that you know where it is?’

‘Yes.’

There was a pause. Cunomar felt the colour wash up from his throat. Ardacos always said he showed passion too readily to the world. In Eneit’s presence, he did not care. Eneit was the one person in the world who knew all of his heart and his longings; which was, of course, why he had said what he had said.

More than anything else, more than passing the spear-test, or learning to lie immobile for a morning’s ambush, Cunomar dreamed of wielding the sword of his ancestors in battle - and could not, because the ghost of his grandfather had made himself visible in the grave mound where the blades were hidden and had forbidden it.

Hanging between them were the words that did not need to be spoken. I offer you a blade with a history that has not been cursed by the ghost of your grandfather. ‘With that as your prize, you could sit your long-nights when the dreamers give the word and

come home a true warrior.

The birds roused for a second time as Cunomar whooped and threw a handful of damp loam at his friend. ‘Eneit nic Lanis, you call yourself my friend and yet you have waited seven months to tell me this? Are you so tired of life?’