Dreaming the Hound (47 page)

‘Tagos’ steading - now Breaca’s - had no roundhouse in which to gather and there had not been time to build one. It had also, by force of circumstance, become winter home to the forty-nine she bear warriors who made Cunomar’s new honour guard and even had they wished it, there was little food to spare for feasting. Thus, those who would fit gathered in Airmid’s hut on the western edge of the steading, that was built most like a roundhouse and could take thirty seated if each did not mind rubbing knees tightly with the other.

They made a spiral, with Ardacos at the outer rim near the door, and Airmid in the centre by the only fire not yet extinguished. As the night progressed, the flames were allowed to die so that it seemed the dark leached in from the margins, pressing the light and the heat inwards and downwards to a dull, red glow in the base of the fire pit.

Close to midnight, Airmid cast a handful of leaves and roots on the embers, and more, until they smothered the last of the light and the harsh, heady smoke of their burning rose into the dark and spread out, touching the furthest of them, offering protection against the thinning boundaries of the night. When she spoke, her voice came from above, or behind, or echoed in both ears together.

‘The year dies and is not yet reborn. In the space between is no time, Briga’s time, when she opens the gateways to the lands beyond life and the trackways from there to here lie clear. This night, of all nights, those who are gone may return without harm or censure, to meet again those who remain within life. Greet them,

hear them, and, when the fire is relit, allow them to return whence they came.’

A collective shudder passed along the spiral, from centre to edge. The air became full, and emptied again, and where had been walls and a sense of safety was suddenly the hollowness of open space, as if each of those present had been walking in fog along a path, and had found themselves suddenly in clear skies on a narrow bridge across a mountain pass, with no handholds and a fathomless drop on either side to the ground below.

Breaca had met the dead too often to fear them, but on this night alone there was the chance she might find that Caradoc no longer lived, that he had died without her knowing and she would discover it only when his shade appeared, mourning the turning of her heart from the single-minded search for vengeance that had once consumed her. She feared that still, above many other things. Sitting in the black night with Graine pressed tight against her on one side, and sweat beading onto her arm from Cunomar on the other, she made herself breathe in Airmid’s harsh smoke, the better to see the approaching dead.

The night remained empty. None of her dead appeared, not Caradoc, nor any of the ancestors who might have been drawn by the torc at her neck. Darkness stretched like a tunnel, punctuated by hollow inhalations of those who had been visited. In the dark, she heard someone say, ‘Eneit?’ and thought it was Lanis, until Cunomar shuddered and she realized that he was weeping, and was glad that he could do so.

No-one else spoke, neither human nor once-human, and, in time, the fire came again. At a signal felt but not heard, Cunomar cleared the embers of the last year’s blaze and Graine, as youngest present, laid tinder on the stone base for the new one. Airmid struck a spark and fanned it and the flames ate shaved bark and dried grass and the hanks of ewe’s wool and the tail hairs of brood mares that were sent to Briga to ask for good birthings.

Women who thought they might be pregnant, or who planned to become so that night, leaned forward and gave three of their own hairs to the fire. The men who thought they might father such children cut a nail paring from the first finger of each hand and gave that, to ask for health in their seed. There were many such pairings; a child conceived on the night of the un-year was fortunate. Born after midsummer, when the harvest had been taken in, it would find no hardship until winter when everyone suffered similarly - or might not, if the coming year turned as Breaca intended.

Airmid said, ‘Next year’s-end, we may see us free of Rome and

all it carries,’ and gave voice to everyone’s thought.

Those gathered left soon after that, carrying lit torches of hawthorn staves dipped in sheep’s fat, and shavings of oak bark and dried rowan leaves with which to start their own fires, never to let them out until the next year’s turning.

Breaca alone remained behind. She banked the fire for morning, and called in Stone, who had been left outside for fear the dead would not approach him.

Airmid came back with the water carriers, and then both brought in the accumulation of urns and beakers and sealed jugs of plants and berries that had been moved outside, the better to accommodate the she-bears.

They sat a while by the firelight, not ready to sleep. The aftertaste of dream smoke flavoured the air. Airmid cast on other leaves, sparingly; rosemary and sage and sharp mint, so that the scents freshened and the walls between the worlds began to feel secure again. She was wearing her neckpiece of silvered frog’s bones that was older than Cunomar, older than Cygfa, older even than the presence of Rome. Smoke coiled about it, and her, so that she could have been a girl again, or infinitely old; a long-dead ancestor keeping care of the still-living.

She poured water, and something else, into a beaker and offered it across the fire to Breaca.

‘Caradoc did not come to you?’ she asked.

‘No.’ Only Airmid would ask, only Airmid could fully be answered. ‘I would like to think that I would know before this if he were dead, but each year I am never sure until the night is over. Then I can forget for half a year, and worry again before the next time.’ Breaca fed Stone the leavings of a roast hare and let him lick the grease from her fingers. He lay across her feet, a solid reassurance. She said, ‘Did Gwyddhien come for you?’

‘Yes. She has come each year since her death. But less now than she did.’

There was pain in that, in the asking of it and hearing the answer. They both moved to lay a stick on the fire so that for a moment they were close. The light became a little stronger, the night a little warmer, the dead a little farther away.

After a while, Airmid said, ‘Cunomar wears well his new armband. Did you ask him to go to Camulodunum in spring?’

‘Yes, and he accepted.’ Breaca drank the flavoured water Airmid

had given her. It tasted of mugwort and burdock and melted snow. Letting the bitterness and the cold settle on her teeth, she said, ‘He’s the best choice, I do know that. He’s the king’s son, and such things matter to Rome. He speaks Latin well and has met the Emperor Claudius, which means he knows how the Romans conduct their formalities, and—’

‘And the risk is enormous, and still you have to let him take it.’ Airmid’s foot reached to touch the side of her knee; a small thing, and a world of comfort. ‘He’s your son as much as Caradoc’s. He has grown into what you both have given him, but he has things he needs to prove, to himself as much as to you.’

‘I know. He said as much. But he’s travelling and fighting alone, and shouldn’t be. It’s the care of the dreamer that makes the warrior. The elder grandmother taught us that and we have lived it since. Cunomar has no dreamer.’

‘Graine would dream for him, willingly. She’s almost old enough to sit her long-nights. It could be done in the spring and she could ride with him after.’

‘Hardly.’ Breaca laughed shortly. ‘Graine hates violence. I can’t imagine her riding into any battle willingly. In any case, Cunomar needs someone in whose shadow he has not spent his life.’ The burdock was working its way into her blood, sharpening sight and sound and touch. She leaned back on a wall and felt the weave of her tunic as a lattice across her back, and the dry serpent’s weight of the torc at her neck, and the press of Airmid’s foot which was against her calf now, not her knee, because she had moved back.

She let her hand rest on the dreamer’s ankle, feeling the small pulse across the top. It was regular and rhythmic and speeded a little under her touch. Not entirely steadily, she said, ‘He needs someone who can be for him what you were to me. And have always been.’

From the dark, after a pause, Airmid said, ‘Thank you.’

Suddenly, they were shy as children in each other’s company, and had never been. Both stirred the fire and added wood, shifting the balance so that it had more fuel but burned less brightly.

Presently, because she needed to speak, Breaca said, ‘Cygfa sleeps alone still. I had thought Braint might have been killed and might come to her as Eneit came to Cunomar, but there was no-one.’

Airmid said, ‘Cygfa carries her wounds deeper than her brother. And Dubornos carries his wounds openly, the greatest of which is that he loves Cygfa and she does not love him. They lived closely

together in Rome and she cares for him as she cares for Cunomar. I think she will not see him hurt further and so keeps chaste because of it.’

‘And yet if she loved another, she would find ways not to hurt Dubornos. That alone would not stop her.’

‘I know, but she doesn’t allow herself to love. Cunomar is desperate for it, and seeks only one who can match him. Cygfa hurts still, deeply, and seeks no-one, believing herself stronger like that.’

‘Could you heal her?’

Airmid grimaced. ‘Only if she asked for it, and she will not. I spoke to her while we were on Mona, when you were hunting legionaries and we were alone. She walked away and I haven’t tried again since. Her pain is her own, to heal as she chooses. As is ours.’

Such a small phrase, to open the world. The pulse under Breaca’s fingers remained steady. The burdock had cleared the day’s clutter from her mind, perhaps the year’s clutter, or longer. For a night - for this night - she had no need to lie awake and plan the future. She poured some of the melt-water onto her cupped palms and rinsed her face with it, then set down the beaker, carefully, away from the fire.

Speaking slowly, navigating among the rocks of her words, she said, ‘It was not to avoid hurting ‘Tagos that I have slept alone these past years, but because of Caradoc.’

‘I know.’

‘And you the same because of Gwyddhien.’

‘Yes.’

Through the three years since Gwyddhien’s death, they had never spoken of this. Breaca nudged a log deeper into the fire. Lit by new flames, she asked, ‘Does she expect it of you still?’

‘She has never expected it at all. As I am certain Caradoc never expected it of you.’

Airmid’s eyes were entirely black. They searched Breaca’s face, across and across. She said, ‘It takes time to heal the pain of loss, and then it takes time to heal the memory of the pain, and the belief that honour requires us to hold that pain for ever. Then it takes more time to find that the loves of our past can still be loved, that something new - or something old, rewoven - does not diminish them. And then while we may know that to be true for others, while we see it in others and want to speak of it daily, it is

harder to see it equally in ourselves.’

They had gone too far, now, to pretend. Breaca said, ‘Did you think I should take someone else to bed after Caradoc?’

Airmid laughed. ‘It surprises me daily that you have not.’

‘But are you glad of it?’

That was when she knew, when she felt the steady beat of Airmid’s pulse become unsteady, telling a truth that she might not have believed in words, or perhaps never dared to ask.

Shakily, Airmid said, ‘Before tonight, I would have told myself not. Tonight I am very glad. Very glad indeed,’ and reached a hand across the fire.

It was hard to breathe then, or to think with any clarity. The fire was between them, and then not between them, and then the beakers, so carefully put out of the way, were spilled onto the rushes of the floor, and neither of them cared because they were no longer dressed and cool water on one side balanced the heat of the fires from the other and in between was the endless mystery and wonder of touch, of skin on skin, of palms meeting, and hips and breasts and lips and teeth and hair and all of life resting in the blink of another’s eye.

Breaca had forgotten how it could be, and, remembering, could not imagine how it had been possible to forget, as if the parched could forget water, or the starving forget the feast laid out for the taking. Her fingers traced contours her memory had long discarded, and brought them back again, renewed, with taste and touch and the heaviness of another body above her, and then below her, and the honey-salt slickness, binding them close.

They stayed awake through the night of the un-year, rediscovering what was old and inventing what could be new, and came to morning wound together like hound whelps among the sleeping-hides, drowsily.

Breaca drifted into sleep, and woke again and lay watching the thread of smoke coil up through the hole in the thatch, closing one eye and then the other, to make it shift back and forth, as her mind shifted with it, caught in the tangles of old images.

Airmid leaned over and kissed her. ‘Good morning. May the year grow well within you.’

Breaca smiled into the kiss. ‘And in you.’ All lovers said that on the first morning of the child-year. Tradition demanded it.

Airmid laid her hand, splay-fingered, on Breaca’s belly and

tipped her head, as if listening. ‘Something has taken seed in the night and it can’t be a child, so it must be a dream. Can it be told?’

‘Easily, but I’m not sure there’s anything you can do.’ Breaca took the hand and kissed the fingers, and then the knuckles, and then the soft place in the centre of the palm where her tongue stayed to trace shapes onto the lines the gods had put there. ‘Unless you can become an iron-seeker and find me raw iron in Eceni lands and then learn to be a smith and help me turn the iron into blades for the war host, and can find a way to keep the legions from the great-house while we—’

‘Breaca, stop. Don’t think of that. Today, this morning, for now, don’t think.’ Airmid’s hands gripped tight, folding fingers into fingers, holding her close. ‘You are not alone in this. You don’t have to fight the wars and arm the warriors and plan everything alone. You know that. Cunomar will go to Camulodunum and he will do well. We have ways to find iron and a smith and I can help with that. And for now, we have this, a gift of the gods. It doesn’t have to be squandered.’ Airmid kissed her forehead and her temples, and her eyelids, slowly, dizzyingly, with a different hunger from the night.