Dreaming the Hound (33 page)

Drained of adult love, he had walked back through time to childhood; had nursed Hail to life, helped at the birth of a dun filly, ridden his father’s battle horse and the red Thessalian cavalry mare in the homelands of the Eceni and once, gloriously, defeated Amminios, brother to Caradoc, in a game of Warrior’s Dance with a slave boy’s life as the prize.

Like running water, the questions had worn at him, probing the cracks in his self-possession until, three nights out of four, he had retired to bed swearing that he would leave and return to Hibernia alone. Each morning, he had awakened and continued, as they had both known he would, as he did now, in the hound-warmed dark with no-one to push him or hold him when he wept.

Only mac Calma’s voice came at him through the silence, an echo of reality made real again in stone.

I offer you your birthright.

It was what his soul had craved through all his adult life and there was no point in denying it.

That single promise had sustained Valerius through the ghastly crossing from Mona to Hibernia and had kept him silent, at least temporarily, when word reached them near midsummer of the

long-drawn death of the governor of Britannia. Rumour said that the dreamers had killed him as they had killed his predecessor, Scapula, in revenge for a boy’s death.

Asked, mac Calma had smiled and said, ‘That wasn’t us. The ancestor-dreamer killed Scapula at Airmid’s request but your sister slew this one alone, with a little help from the she-bears of the Caledonii and their unique understanding with the gods.’

His sister, Breaca, whose name was not, and never had been, mentioned.

Valerius’ mind slewed away from that and mac Calma did not drag him back again although it was the closest the Elder ever came to discussing the ways of gods and dreamers and the means by which one might talk to the other; that and the single cryptic sentence, given as Valerius was already closing himself off from the world.

You will know when it is time.

There was no time; the ancestors’ dreaming chamber was too dark for that. Lacking light, Valerius had lost all sense of time. Lacking time, he had lost himself, a soul trapped in its own company with his past too much alive around him; nine months of talking had made it so.

Fighting a rising panic, he tried to take refuge in the present, discovering too late that there was no longer anything to hold him but the slow, safe breath of a hound and the endless echo of mac Calma’s voice speaking riddles for which he had no answers.

You will know when it is time.

Time to do what?

I offer you your birthright…

And I accept. Only tell me what I must do.

I cannot help you.

Who else if not you?

Valerius would have wept, had there been any point. Even in the despair of adult dreaming, he had never imagined failure of this magnitude. The boy who was Ban had dreamed of his long-nights, safe in the care of his mother, who would not let him fail. Now, he was failing and could do nothing about it.

You will know.

He knew nothing, and had no means to find out. In despair, he turned sideways and lay down, squirming until his back was safe in the curve of the hound and the weight of its breath guarded his neck. Lying like that, as he had lain in childhood, Julius Valerius closed his eyes and sought the freedom of sleep.

Which gods did you petition?

‘I have no gods.’

His own voice woke him, too loud for the dark. Mac Calma’s question drifted ahead, as if recently asked.

The vengeful gods laughed and made Bellos blind again, slaying a foal as their own blood-price. Mithras walked on fire and water and the blood of a slain bull filled the ancestors’ chamber and washed away with the tide.

‘You have too many gods. You can’t keep them all. Which do you choose?’

The voice was his own, brought outside himself. It came out of the dry air and the drier stone and tapped at his bones.

Half a dozen answers crowded for space. If he had been in company - if it were mac Calma, or Theophilus, or Corvus who asked such a question - Valerius would have picked the response that kept them safely distant. In their absence, he stared at the dark and waited for the clamour inside to die away. He did not intend to play games with a mind shaken loose of itself. Too much of his life had been given to ghosts and half-dreams forged in pain and isolation. He craved a long-nights that was real, or none at all.

When there was silence, and Valerius was sure of himself, he said, clearly, ‘Go away.’

The dark fell silent. Time moved on and he was given his wish; the air did not speak again. The waiting lay on him like a mountain.

Light-headed, he rolled over and sat up. The hound roused with him, slowly. They had shared sleep together and the beast’s size and presence were no longer a threat. It was free to leave, where Valerius was not. That it chose to stay was a gift and accepted as such. It stood and stretched in the cramped space and turned and came to lie with its chin on his thigh, as Hail had lain in the joy filled days of their youth.

This hound was bigger than Hail, close to the size he had imagined Hail to be when the skewed scales of childhood had made all hounds vast and Hail greatest of them all. Its hair was

long and coarse as Hail’s had been and, in the dark, Valerius was free to imagine the patternings of white on brindle that had given his first hound, the best of all hounds, its name. He buried his face in the wild ruff of its mane. The smell smothered him; hound and woodsmoke and hunted hare and family and home and all things lost.

The man he had been would have walked away from that rather than remember it. The man he had become, product of the dark and the gods and the unknowing, walked willingly into the mire of his past and begged it to drown out the voice of Luain mac Calma.

It worked, for a while, possibly for days - he had no means to measure the passage of time - but it could not last for ever. Luain mac Calma reached out to him from the recent past, blocking any further escape. His voice was more solid than it had been, as if he spoke from the bedrock of the chamber.

Any failure means death, not only of your body but of your soul. Failure.

The blackness stank of it, and would not be made clear.

Faced with no other choice, Julius Valerius, who had once been Ban of the Eceni, pushed the hound’s head from his thigh, drew his knees for a second time to his chest and began at last to consider exactly what it might mean to lose his soul.

The process was not pretty, or dignified. To imagine the loss of his soul, he first had to discover it, to map its margins, its contours and textures and the many ways in which he had not lived by its calling. He had believed himself honest in his own dishonesties; possessed of an integrity which, if warped by the standards of his family, tribe and friends, was nevertheless true to itself. Every action he had ever taken had been tested against the too-sharp weapon of his own judgement and the fabric of his life had been woven around it.

With an honesty that stripped to the bare bones every hidden feeling, Valerius set about testing the truth of that. Far more than mac Calma had asked for, he stepped back to the earliest memory of his life and walked forward through the months and years, cataloguing for himself and the absent gods every failure of integrity, every self-lie, every instance of mortal weakness.

If he were to guess, another day and part of a night might have passed in the slow unpicking of his life’s failings. The hound left once and came back, smelling of fresh blood and, less strongly, of urine. It did not bring any meat for Valerius, but it was doubtful if he could have eaten by then; he was too immersed in the dismantling of himself.

He expected the ghosts to come, hissing their anger and sucking

at his sanity for vengeance as they had done when their deaths were fresh. Perversely, their absence left him hollow; there had been comfort in the discomfort of their rage. He did not ask for the gods’ help and they, unpetitioned, did not answer. Every step was taken alone, without assistance, and by their absence Valerius came finally, unwillingly, to recognize their presence in all that had gone before; whether he liked it or not, every part of his life had been shaped within the protective arms of the unnamed gods.

Even now. Even here. He passed through the last memory and came to rest in the present and he was not alone. The gods of his past were all around: Briga and Mithras, Nemain and Jupiter and Manannan of the waves who made him sick but did not kill him. The chamber was crowded by their presences, watching, waiting for him to act. The hound felt them and whined, stretching a warm tongue to his wrist as comfort for them both.

Aloud, Valerius said, ‘What do you want of me?’

The gods gave no answer. Their silence crushed him. Their waiting drove him, ultimately, to act.

Over hours, over days, Valerius attempted every feat of dreaming he had ever imagined - and failed in each one. He built images in the dark and they melted. He spoke tales that mac Calma had told him and their heroes did not come alive. He named the thousand ghosts of his dead and they walked past and past until all that was left was the memory of their shadows. He viewed and reviewed and discarded every particle of his life, scouring the passageways of his soul until the winds whistled through and he was emptied of all thought and all feeling. The gods watched and waited and offered nothing.

You’re trying too hard. Bellos spoke from the safest part of his past.

Valerius said, ‘I know. I don’t know how to do anything different.

The hound came to sit in front of him. In his memory, its eyes were amber. He chose to think of them so. He held its great head between both of his hands and said, ‘Friend, I’m sorry. You have guarded the wrong man against dangers that did not come from the outside. I wish you luck with the others who come after me.’

He did not end out of self-pity, or bitterness, but only because there was nothing else he could do. Pressing the flat of both palms to the floor, Valerius pushed himself upright against protesting joints and muscles that burned from too long cramped tight. The roof of the chamber rubbed the top of his head. Stretching out both hands, he touched his palms to the stone on either side. The hound pressed its chin against his thigh. If life had been different, it would have been good to have ridden with it into battle.

He bowed a little to the waiting dark. ‘I have failed. I apologize.

Perhaps I would always have done so. I thank you for keeping me from the understanding of this long enough to live the life that I have done. With all its failings, with the deaths and the loss and the pain, it has been the fullest and best it could have been, for which I offer my deepest thanks.’

He expected no answer and was given none. He felt his way round the walls and came to the tunnel that the ancestors had built. Crawling in, full of hope, he had felt the place a womb and had imagined himself emerging, reborn into light, a man at peace with his gods and heir to the legacy of Mona’s dreamers. For that hubris alone, he deserved whatever was coming. Crawling out towards fresh air past the spiralled carvings of the past, he tried to remember the many ways in which those who had abandoned their long-nights had died. In this, too, he failed.

Valerius emerged into a night of no moon and few stars and it seemed to him bright.

Expecting death, or the slow beginnings of it, he scrambled with what dignity he could over the guard stone at the tunnel’s entrance. On the way in, the light of mac Calma’s fire had flooded the carvings on the surface of the boulder, sinking shadows into the spheres and circles etched by the ancestors. Now, there was nothing but warm winter wind and the silvered greys of a land that believed itself black.

The hound did not follow him out. He thought to call it and decided not; it was safer for it not to be caught up in whatever was coming. Putting his hands to his mouth, he sent his voice away from the dream mound.

‘Hello?’

He felt foolish, more so when he was not answered. His flesh crawled and his hungry guts cramped but no-one came; no waiting dreamers, no knives, no ropes to bind him down as they flayed the skin from his chest and opened his living belly to the crows. The turves had been relaid over the circle of mac Calma’s fire. If Valerius had not sat before it for a night, awaiting the dawn to enter the chamber, he would not know where it had been.

The gods and the hound had abandoned him, but Valerius did not believe Luain mac Calma would leave before the end. Unwilling to be seen to search, he sat down on the guard stone to wait. After the intensity of the ancestors’ chamber, there was a welcome peace in not thinking.

Presently, when still no-one had come to kill him, he remembered the place where the wood was stored. Searching through a

cavity in the dry southern side of the hill, he found tinder and a fire pot packed with old, dying embers. He was an officer in the auxiliary cavalry, or had been; he had built fires with less than this and been warmed by them.

Instinct drew him away from the hill, towards a swath of old oaks with a river winding through the centre. He had been a long time without water. In the dream place, it had not seemed important. In the presence of an unending stream of cold, clear water, thirst consumed him. He lay down and sank his face into it and drank for an eternity that stretched as long as the time he had spent in the ancestors’ mound.

The cold steadied him and gave him purpose. He laid out the wood at a place where the river bent back on itself so that water surrounded three sides. His fire burned with small flames. By its light, he lay on the bank and slid his hands into the water and dribbled spit onto the surface to lure winter fish. They were few, but he was possessed of a patience that would have astonished those he had led, amongst whom the shortness of his temper had been legendary. At the blackest part of the night that comes before dawn, he caught a small trout and roasted it. The smell alone was of the gods; the taste consumed him.

Afterwards, he sat by the fire to wait. If he had been concerned for his own safety, he would have kept the river behind him as protection. Safety was the least of his concerns and so he faced east, to where the late-rising moon lifted over the horizon, and kept the water ahead and on either side with his back exposed to whoever might come.