Dreaming the Hound (3 page)

Breaca looked back down the path to where the dying messenger waited out of earshot. He had dismounted when she did and stood leaning against his horse. As she watched, he slid slowly to his knees, and then toppled sideways to lie curled like a child, breathing harshly.

If she had been alone, she would have taken her chances dodging the legions and stayed out in the open. If she waited, she would be

alone before too long, but the dying man was Eceni and from Efnis and he had given his life to bring a message to Mona. She could not with any honour leave him to die on a mountain path within reach of the legions when there was shelter at hand.

Touching the hound stone as much for courage as for luck, Breaca said, ‘We are two, one wounded, one assailed by flux. We ask only to enter into your protection, bringing our horses, nothing more. The Romans who seek our lives are close behind; I saw them enter the valley as we climbed the mountain. It is my belief that their trackers will have no knowledge of your dwelling place, and that if they did, the legionaries would not dare to cross the threshold. Even they recognize the sacred when they meet it.’

Or if not the sacred, then the simply dangerous. The ancestor’s laughter was the slide of a snake over winter leaves, a sound to erase all peace and the hope of peace. They know I will pierce their dreams, waking and sleeping, and they will die as did their governor, slowly and in madness. They may not fear you enough to abandon the land, Breaca once-Eceni, but they fear me enough to make offerings in secret to quell my wrath.

Breaca had seen the twists of corn and broken wine flasks and, once, the rotting head of a doe as she led the horses up the trail. She had not known them as offerings to the serpent-dreamer and even now could not confirm it. She said nothing. A lifebeat of waiting passed. Then, Yes, you may enter. I, who may yet destroy you, give you leave.

The cave was not as fully dark as Breaca had expected. The horses walked willingly into the entrance and were made safe in a chamber open to the sky, three spear lengths inside. Here, bird lime streaked the walls in layers of white and caked the floor, cushioning the sound of hooves. Hollows in the rock held water and the recent rain had made them clean.

Further in, the sky could not be so clearly seen, but grey light leaked for a while from the towered heights of the roof. On the floor, the skeletons of small beasts cracked underfoot where they had fallen, unwilling sacrifices to the ancestor and the gods. The walls pressed inwards so that the pathway became a tunnel and rock snagged Breaca’s tunic at both shoulders.

‘We should stop.’ The Eceni messenger could barely walk. He tugged on Breaca’s sleeve.

‘Not yet. There’s a turn ahead and then the floor opens into a chamber with a river running through. We can rest there and you can drink the water. You need it.’

He held on to her, staring. In the failing light, she could see the widening whites of his eyes. ‘Have you been here before?’ he asked.

‘No, but I know of it.’ She did not tell him that the serpent voice of the ancestor-dreamer drew her on, whispering, nor that it had spelled out the time and manner of his death.

The chamber they entered last was too broad for Breaca easily to map the margins, and entirely without light. Working by feel, she laid and lit a small fire. Orange shadows drew monsters from the dark, casting ghost-flames on the small river flowing through the northern corner of the cave. Echoes of water thickened the silence. The sound was pleasanter by far than the sibilant hiss of the ancestor.

At the river’s edge, Breaca tended the dying messenger. She folded her cloak and his and laid him on both on a bed of flat rock. He had brought his own water skin, long empty, and she filled it and let him drink and then washed his face, neck and hands with what was left.

‘You should not,’ he said, less certainly than before. ‘We were three; two brothers and a sister, each charged with the same message. We had ridden only two nights when the flux took us. It passes from one to the other faster than a cough in a winter’s roundhouse.’

Breaca said, ‘If I am to die, this place is as good as any; the legion’s inquisitors won’t find us here to wrench what we know from the last breath of our lungs. If I am to live, then you can rest tended in safety. What happened to your brother and sister?’

‘I don’t know. We took separate roads when we met the legions. Each of us was to ride for Mona. With three, there was hope one would live to reach the ferry and deliver our words.’

Ask him his message. The ancestor’s voice cracked off the walls. In her own place, she sounded far louder than the dying man.

‘When he has peace.’ Breaca spoke aloud and the messenger was too near death to notice.

She had tended the dying times without number on the battlefield, but only rarely with other sickness, so that it took some time to do what was needful. She bent over him, trying to see past the tallow-grey skin to the life and the mind beneath. His face shrank onto the bones of his skull. His eyes had fallen deep into the folding flesh of his face and his hair was slick with sweat and the water with which he had just been washed.

Ask!

Touching her palm to his forehead, she said carefully, ‘This is your resting place. Briga will take you from here and the ancestor will guide you safely to the lands beyond life. I will return to Mona when it’s safe to travel. Is it your wish that I carry your message with me?’

‘It would be, but I can’t give it while not yet on Mona.’ The man grimaced, trying to rise, and failed. ‘I’m sorry. It would kill both of us if I tried. Efnis laid a geas on all three messengers. If I tried to speak, my tongue would swell in my mouth and block my breathing before the words were out. More, the one to whom I spoke would die, if not as suddenly, then as surely. If caught, we were permitted to say that much to whoever tried to press the question.’

Breaca smoothed the hair from his brow and poured on a little water to cool it. ‘Efnis is wise. If you had been captured, it would have been good to die swiftly, knowing your message safe and Rome’s interrogators condemned to a slow end.’

The man struggled with that, frowning. ‘But not so good now when I am dying in the company of a warrior and friend. I will take my message safely into death and Efnis will never know of my failure.’

‘He will. No-one passes to the other worlds but the dreamers know of it. Even so, I may have an answer. Would I be right to believe that your message was to be given to the Elder of Mona, Luain mac Calma, or, failing him, to Airmid of Nemain, and that it concerned the Boudica?’

It was a risk. Neither of them knew the margins of the curse. The messenger smiled faintly and tested his answer silently twice before, nodding, he said, ‘You would be correct.’

They both waited. In the moments that followed, his breathing was not impaired, nor did his tongue swell any more than the flux had already swollen it.

Breaca let out a breath. ‘So then if I were to tell you that my daughter, second child of my heart, soul and flesh, is called Graine after my mother and that my father was Eburovic, smith and warrior of the Eceni, would your mouth remain unblocked and your tongue unswollen as you delivered to me your message?’

His eyes had fallen shut and did not open when she finished. Waiting, Breaca did not know if he slept, or if the shock of her identity, however obliquely revealed, had carried him beyond speech.

The relief when he reached out and gripped her hand left her without words. He opened his eyes and tears wavered on the rims, cast in copper by the firelight. His voice was a fine thread, drawn tight by pain and effort. ‘You are the Boudica? The Warrior of Mona?’

She nodded, smiling. ‘Yes.’

He shoved himself upright, wheezing. ‘Why then are you here, unbraided, wearing the black feather of no-tribe and hunting alone in lands held by Rome?’

She had not expected his anger, nor the sudden energy it gave him; he knew nothing of the soul-stripping meetings between the Boudica and the dreamers she served, of the battles fought amongst friends with words the only weapons. He did not choose to hide the accusation in his voice or the hurt in his eyes. He laid himself down again, but his gaze, challenging hers, could have been mac Calma’s, or Dubornos’, or Ardacos’, or any one of her children’s.

Rising, Breaca laid a fistful of heather roots on the fire. Fresh flames sparked green and a violent blue where the earth burned before wood. Staring at the colours and not the man, she said, ‘I have been killing Romans, as you saw. The four dead of the third cohort were my kills, and two the night before last.’

The messenger was an intelligent man. Watching her, he said, ‘So you hunt alone because the risk is too great to expose others to the danger and Briga will take you into death when she feels the killing is enough. Do the elder dreamers of Mona consider that a good risk?’

‘Not at all.’ Breaca smiled, surprising them both. ‘But it is not for them to forbid it. My life is my own and I believe it is a good risk. It’s nearly winter; the time for fighting is over but the legions must still forage far beyond their forts for food and firewood. There’s more damage done to their minds with four men dead in the night than with forty dead on the battlefield in open warfare. Each death leads to desertions and those left behind dream of a time when they can leave and sail for Rome. An army that comes to the field without heart fights to lose, you know that.’

‘I do. And a people lacking the leadership of the gods does not fight at all.’ An old anger flickered, and a more recent fear. Each died away, leaving only the fatal weariness that had cloaked the messenger when he first fell from his horse.

Carefully, Breaca said, ‘The Eceni do not lack leadership.’

‘They do now.’

He was dying fast; both of them could feel it. Words unspoken weighed on them, sucking breath from the air. Choosing the path that offered least damage, Breaca asked, ‘Can you tell me in what way your people and mine are leaderless?’

‘I don’t know. Saying that much might kill us both.’

He gathered himself and then, against her protests, pushed himself to sitting. His gaze devoured her face and then moved down to the reddening wound on her arm. The spear’s head had not, after all, been so clean. Blood seeped a little from the gash, but the arm around was angry and hot, and had begun to smell unclean. He reached out to touch it and they both felt the flesh twitch under his fingers.

He said, ‘Perhaps Efnis was wiser than either of us knew and you are dying anyway.’

Breaca sluiced water over the wound. ‘Perhaps. I have felt closer to death than this, but they say Briga often comes when least expected.’

‘Not for me.’ He smiled and the shape stayed on his lips long after his mind had gone elsewhere. In a while, he said, ‘Efnis crafted his words for Airmid, dreamer of Nemain, but the tales have always said that she holds one half of your soul and Caradoc the other. If that is true, then it may be that, in the gods’ eyes, I am speaking as if to Airmid and I can speak to you safely. I am willing to try, but my death is certain. I have nothing to lose. You could have many more winters of hunting Romans alone. Will you risk the loss of that, to hear my message?’

Breaca closed her left fist, feeling the brush of pain in her palm that was the memory of a sword cut. It did not ache to warn her of danger. The spear wound in her upper arm throbbed alarmingly, but other wounds had been as deep and gone as bad and she had not died of them.

She looked across the fire into the darkness of the cave but found no help there; the ancestor-dreamer was uncharacteristically silent. As at all the most important decisions in her life, Breaca was alone. There was a freedom in being so.

She said, ‘There is not so much pleasure in killing Romans that I would want to miss a message from Efnis that has cost the lives of three warriors. Yes, I will share your risk.’

II.

‘YOUR SISTER IS DEAD.’

‘I have no sister.’

The air in the smithy was dense with the smoke of scorched metal and loud with the clatter of beaten iron. Sun streaming in through the smoke hole cast a puddle of light on the floor, missing both the stoked fire and the anvil. Neither was a mistake; the smith of Hibernia liked the red shadows of his work-world and had no desire to meet the exposure of daylight, particularly not in his current company.

He played his hammer down the arm’s length of cooling metal that would one day soon become a sword blade and felt the rhythm rock pleasingly through his bones. Doing so, he ignored the visitor standing on his threshold. Quite deliberately, he did not invite him to cross it.

Luain mac Calma, once of Hibernia, now Elder and foremost dreamer of Mona, was not used to being ignored. He had rarely been denied entry to the home of another and never when he had travelled ten days to bring news of some moment.

Nor did he need light to see the body and soul of the man he had come to visit; a dreamer spends a great deal of his life in half darkness. Standing on the threshold, he studied the straight, blue-black hair, grown to shoulder length when once it had been cut short to please the legions, the lean lines of the body, once battle-fit and kept almost to that by the work of the forge, the sculpted cheekbones and high brow of a man whom the gods had spun far away from his life’s course, and not yet cast back. There was anger there, and a stubborn pride, and neither of these quite covered the fear, or the effort being made to hide it.

All of this, he compared to what he had last seen of this man, and was not disappointed; three years’ peace and solitude had healed more than mac Calma had thought possible. His doubts, which were many, rested on the condition of the smith’s heart and soul.

He drew a breath and let it out, slowly. Over the pounding clash of the hammer, he said, ‘You are Ban mac Eburovic, Harehunter and horse-dreamer of the Eceni, and I am growing very tired of your fictions. Your boy tells me—’

‘He is not my boy.’ The hammer missed a beat and, stammering, found it again. ‘He calls himself Bellos, after the Bellovaci who were his people among the Belgae. I may have bought him as slave but I have returned to him his name and his freedom. Nevertheless, he hates me. He remains here only because his fear of the Hibernians is greater than his hatred of me. Their menfolk are not