Dreaming the Hound (20 page)

‘No.’ Eneit’s slow, wide smile spread across his face. ‘But I didn’t find out how much it mattered to you until the snow was too deep for us to go looking for them. I promise you, this is one place where we don’t want anyone to follow our tracks.’

He was grave and there was an unaccustomed wariness in his eyes. Seeing it, Cunomar said, ‘Are the swords in a grave mound of the ancestors? Made of stone, with grass over, so that it looks like a long hill?’

Eneit’s grin died. ‘How do you know that?’

‘I’ve been in one like it.’ With his foot Cunomar swept dried leaves and some muddied ones over the place where the wooden blades were concealed. Cygfa or Dubornos could probably find them, Ardacos or the Boudica certainly, but no Roman would know where to look. He squinted at the sun, weighing fear against passion, and finding the balance wholly uneven. Ardacos had always said that the mark of a true she-bear was the ability to seize the gift of the gods as it was given, not mourn its passing afterwards when it had been missed.

Slowly, feeling the moment grow within him, he said, ‘The snow’s gone; no-one will track us now that way. We’ll go as she bears and if we meet anyone else on the way, we’ll stop and come back. We must treat this as war. If the Romans find us with weapons, ‘Tagos won’t be able to stop them from hanging us.’

‘I know.’ Eneit laughed. ‘And if my mother finds us first, they’ll be lucky to have anything to hang.’ He spat on his palm and held it out. ‘We’ll go as she-bears and that way no-one but Ardacos, and maybe Cygfa, could find us. I know the way so I’ll have to lead. You follow my tracks. Close your eyes and sing the lay of the fallen warrior. When it’s done, I’ll be gone. I bet you a new sword belt that you can’t touch me before we reach the grave mound.’

Eneit had learned well. He left no trail that an untrained eye could have followed and the one he did leave was so faint that Cunomar was grateful for the intermittent markers, the newly broken twigs and scuffles of stones and, once, a dead branch planted in the earth, that had been deliberately placed to point the way.

Hunter and hunted left the forest and moved out across the open fen. Eneit knew this land from birth. He was at home in the flatness,

where only the early flowering gorse broke the straight line of the horizon, and solid ground gave way to marsh with no warning so that a man could drown if not wary.

Cunomar lay flat behind a clump of reeds on the edge of still water and watched for signs of movement. A stone’s throw away, a band of mares nursed their foals, grazing. A skein of ducks made an arrowhead against the almost-white sky. A hawk skimmed low over the marsh and twisted sideways for a kill. Feathers plumed upwards, where it had been and it rose a while later carrying a pigeon.

If he had not been watching that, Cunomar would not have seen the smooth, rolling movement that was a body sliding over flat ground and into a dip. The land was not, apparently, as flat as he had thought. With a small flame of satisfaction leaping in his chest, he studied the ways he might approach the dip without attracting attention - and could see none. Ardacos’ teaching for these circumstances was clear; when there is no way to move without being seen, everything must move to cover the one thing that matters.

Cunomar carried a handful of pebbles in a pouch at his belt for exactly this reason. Squirming down behind the clump of grass to gain room, he drew his arm back and flung a round river stone in a high arc, aiming for a bay roan mare whose foal was the newest and most vulnerable of the band grazing nearby. He counted to five before the stone landed, hitting her squarely on the flank, and another two before all eight mares were at a full gallop, spread out across the fen with their foals at their sides. The drumming of hooves roused roosting birds from the sedge and sent them spiralling for the sky.

The movement had come from his right. He ran left, therefore, and doubled back on himself like a hare, diving into the shallow dip in the ground in which Eneit lay, looking out towards the horses. He landed just short of it, but struck with his fist as if armed, and on the aching end of a breath shouted, ‘I have you!’

The strike that caught him came from behind. A stick hammered hard and squarely under the ribs, bruising his kidneys and knocking the wind from him for the second time in one morning. His vision blurred, shading to deepest red with orange flares at the centre. For a moment, he thought he might be sick. Floating over his head, he heard a joyous, joyful voice say, ‘I don’t think so, bear man. I have you.’

He rolled over, choking. Eneit, naked and grinning, stood near his ankles, a length of knotted gorse root in his hand. Eneit’s tunic, stuffed with pulled reeds, lay in front of him, a clod of overturned

mud near the neck for a head, the roots artistically tangled to simulate Eneit’s hair.

‘I’m distraught,’ said his friend solemnly. ‘I had no idea you thought my hair looked like a handful of marsh grass.’

The words spread out in the air and their meaning drifted down piecemeal to Cunomar who, frowning, fitted them back together. Slowly, still gasping for breath, he began to laugh. It was a long time since he had laughed and meant it. A tight, unpractised bark of amusement grew, achingly, to something uncontrolled that hurt with each breath, that rolled out across the fen, louder than the steadying horses, lower-pitched than the fluting cries of the birds, and left him, in the end, lying flat on his back, helpless as a kitten, giggling weakly while Eneit looked on, feigning quizzical bemusement.

The sky was no longer the pale grey it had been, but showed the first shimmer of blue. The circling birds had begun to settle, but for a duet of jackdaws that flew over, cawing. The turf beneath Cunomar’s back was warm and springy and ripe with the scents of sand and sedge and standing water. His chest ached and his kidneys were bruised but there was a warmth spreading out in his belly that he had not felt since early childhood and possibly not even then. It dawned on him slowly that, for the first time he could remember, he was genuinely happy. It was a sensation to savour, not to destroy. Quite consciously, he chose not to examine the causes of it.

The world grew calmer and more mellow. Taking a deep breath, Cunomar levered himself up onto one elbow. Eneit, dressed again, sat on the top of the bank, an elbow propped on one knee. He had stopped grinning some time ago and simply watched. His wide, open face was intelligent in ways he often took pains to conceal. Cunomar sat up. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

Eneit shrugged. ‘You don’t have to say that. I couldn’t have done it if you hadn’t taught me.’

‘I didn’t teach you to make me laugh.’

‘No. But then I didn’t make you laugh. You did that all by yourself.’ The youth drew a stalk of old grass, examined the end and then chewed on it, neatly stripping the core of fresh green and leaving a hollow husk. ‘It was good to see, though. It’s been a long time coming.’

‘Yes.’

They were an arm’s reach apart, and a little more. Neither

moved to bridge the gap. They sat in a silence that had more weight to it than before while the morning settled and tranquillity spread over the broad fen. A spear’s throw away, the mares dropped their heads and their foals nursed, then drifted away to play with their peers. When he had watched them for too long and his mind would not settle, Cunomar looked up and found that the air above him had cleared until all he could see was a hawk making lazy circles in the blue.

Needing to talk and not knowing what to say, he asked, ‘Would you want that as your dream if it came to you in your long-nights?’

‘What?’ Eneit’s voice was distant, as if returning from far away.

‘The hawk. Would you want it as your dream on your long nights?’

‘Why? So I can carve it on the pommel of a cracked wooden sword?’

Eneit was not grinning. His eyes were lazily lidded and, for once, impossible to read. When Cunomar did not respond, he rolled over and propped himself up on his elbows.

Not once through the whole winter had he questioned Cunomar’s obsession with the warrior’s rites and the passage to adulthood. Now, he said quietly, ‘Your mother has taught me to hear the soul-song of a spear and you have taught me to wield a blade like a man and I have found a new life through both of these. If the time comes - when it comes - I will kill as many Romans as I can before they kill me, knowing that, in the end, they will kill me because however much I still the voice in my head, however hard I train with my wooden blade in the forest before dawn, I will never become as practised in true battle as they. Why, then, do I need a dream, Cunomar mac Caradoc, son of the Boudica? Will it bring me closer to what I want?’

The weave of the morning changed, became too raw, too serious where before had been geniality and simple friendship. In Cunomar’s world of black and white certainties, too many things were newly uncertain. He stared at his hands and the hawk and back again, not at Eneit. An image of a broken spear-blade fixed in his mind and Eneit’s voice telling him that his heart would break if the weapon were not mended. He wanted to say that his mother could mend anything but the words would not come.

Presently, when the press of the silence grew too great and he needed to hear the sound of his own voice, he asked, ‘Why are we going to the mound of the ancestors if not to help find your dream?’

Eneit breathed out slowly and audibly through his nose. After a

space, he said, ‘To find yours, of course. Or, at the least, to find Sinochos’ sword for you so that when the dreamers name your time and you spend three nights alone and come back to take your spear-trials, your mother has a blade to give you when you pass them.’

His voice lost its harshness and discovered instead the god moved lilt that he got from his mother, the dreamer. More gently, he said, ‘You forget, I haven’t lived on Mona. I’ve never seen someone come home with the rising sun at their backs and the new dream alive in their eyes. I have never seen a warrior school, or stood on the heights above a battle and witnessed acts of heroism that will last in the songs a thousand years. I live in a different world and the things I want are different. We all dream. You and I just have to know that where our dreams take us is not the same. Come on …’ He pushed himself upright and kicked Cunomar accurately on the sole of one foot. ‘Get up. You owe me a sword belt. The mound’s in the next dip. If you’re fit to walk, we’ll find you a blade with a history to be proud of and see if it pushes the dreamers into naming a date for your long-nights.’

The ancestors’ grave was half the size of the one in which the Boudica and her warriors had hidden their weapons. It was roundly flat, half submerged in the sand, and grass had gained hold in the cracks between the rocks so that even from close by, it was hard to pick it out from the surrounding turf. The entrance was a once-square hole low down one side, rounded at the corners and rubbed almost circular by weather and the passage of many people.

There was no question now of simply looking and leaving. Eneit led the way and Cunomar followed. The opening did not lead directly to a passage as the one in the other mound had done, but rather opened over emptiness so that anyone seeking entrance had to lower himself down and then, trusting, let go and fall the last distance to the ground below.

The drop was not as far as Cunomar had feared it might be, less than a spear’s length from his dangling legs to the floor. He landed unsteadily on stone in the half-dark and the cold, in a place where shadows made the space seem larger and the draught of their landing raised for a while the old dust of the ancient dead.

The dead here were no more welcoming than they had been before. Cunomar felt the ghosts’ impatience as a fluttering in his abdomen. Belatedly, he remembered Eneit’s fear. Lanis’ son stood directly under the gap in the roof, wide-eyed and with an unsteady tilt to his smile.

‘Have you been here before?’ Cunomar asked.

‘No.’ Eneit moved a step away from the light, waving an arm out

in front of himself to feel for the walls. ‘Until you came there was no reason to look for a blade. I wouldn’t have known how to pick it up, never mind use it.’ He took another two steps and stopped, barely visible in the dark. ‘There’s a wall here.’ Then, after a pause, ‘And the roof comes down low.’

‘If there is a blade, it will be hidden off the floor, in cracks where the stone makes a lip, so anyone bringing in torches won’t see it.’

Cunomar spoke into silence. He could have been alone. After a while, Eneit, strained, said, ‘How do you know that?’

‘My mother and the warriors hid their blades in a mound like this. I went with them, to watch.’

‘Did you feel as if they hated you?’

‘Yes. But they loved my sister.’

Cunomar found himself wishing for Graine’s company. She was at home in the grey places between the worlds in ways he himself was not. His outstretched fingers brushed against stone.

‘There’s a wall here too. You go right, I’ll go left, we’ll meet in the middle and cross over, that way we’ll have each felt all of the wall. Feel in front of you at shoulder height for cracks that stretch sideways and are long enough to take a blade.’

Following his own advice, he stepped sideways, slowly, sweeping his fingertips across the stone in front of him. The clamour in his abdomen became a grinding ache. The skin of his neck and arms prickled. Greasy sweat gathered along his brow and slid down to his cheeks. He took a third step and felt something substantial flutter past.

A wounded man groaned the name of Briga. Cunomar said, ‘Your mother should come here. The shades of the battle-dead have not all left for the other world. Lanis is of Briga. She has the raven as her mark. She could help them find their way across the river.’ His voice bounced off the walls and came back to him, hoarsely rasping.

Eneit’s sounded no better. ‘She comes here often. She came before the gathering when she spoke against your mother, and came out knowing how to speak so that the gathering would vote for the Boudica to stay.’

‘She has a courage beyond any warrior’s.’

‘I know. All the dreamers do. Has it really taken you this long to discover that?’