Dreaming the Serpent Spear (50 page)

“You could, but I’m not sorry. Why did you not?”

“I thought you would have wanted to hear it from me. And I wanted to see what you had become. We hear things at third hand, or fourth, and rumours come in pairs, one part set against the other. I needed to know if it were true that the Boudica had lost her heart after the rape of her daughters, as some said, or if, as we preferred to believe, she had instead grown with it to be greater than she ever was on Mona and in the western wars.”

They were alone; his honour guard had taken themselves off to lie in the lee of the boulders, rolled in their cloaks, on beds of springing heather. Cygfa was hunting somewhere by herself. Ardacos was nearby and still awake, but no longer sharing the fire. He sat against a rock with birches on either side, not quite out of earshot; she could see the shine of his eyes and then presently the darkness as he closed them. She did not think he was asleep.

Venutios sat with his hands looped over one knee, watching her. The firelight danced across his face, exploring the new hollows that a year on the run had given him. He had taught her what it was to be Warrior of Mona, and had given the horn to her as she had given it to Gwyddhien. No-one else living knew what it took to do that. Because she could ask it of him and expect a clear answer, she said, “What do you find, between the rumours and the fact?”

“That you are changed far more than I had expected. That parts of you are broken and parts are greater than they were, very much greater. I see you clearly now and there’s a light that shines from within, as if a cloak has fallen that was a necessary concealment, to protect you from the brightness as much as us. I am thinking that it cannot be easy to live with what you have become, but I think also that you have found something to fight for that you did not know before?”

“I have, yes.”

It was late; they should have slept, and neither could. They put more heather on the fire and sat closer and then lay down, head to head, and for the first time since it had happened Breaca told of the ancestor’s prophecy and the question it posed and the healing she had found in its answer.

Later, when Ardacos’ eyes had been shut for a very long time and Venutios was, in any case, lying with his head so close to hers that the words passed from breath to breath between them, she showed him the ring that had been Cunobelin’s gift and tried to put into words how it was to hold the lineage of the Sun Hound and its promise; how he was with her and yet not part of her as the ancestor-dreamer had become; how it had changed her understanding of death even though she had lived on the borderline between the worlds for all of her adult life.

Venutios was wise, and had been Warrior and knew what it was to fight for something greater than life and blood. He listened until she had run out of words, and at the end he asked a single question, and did not press when she was unable to answer.

Later, when he had taken himself to another fire to sleep, she settled down in the lee of a boulder with her head on her saddle pad and Stone hard at her side for warmth and lay staring at the stars, asking herself the same thing. She fell asleep without finding an answer.

She woke at dawn, and was no wiser.

The fire was a mound of red ash, only warm if she put her hands close enough to burn the skin. She fed it the thinnest of heather roots and dead leaves and nursed the flames until they leapt to bite her fingers and were safe to leave.

At her back, the sun made its own fire. It was larger here than in the south, hanging just off the lip of the crag so that it seemed she could step off the rock into its heart. She stood on the cold stone and watched the gods stoke their own furnace and asked them Venutios’ question.

Red fire became gold, became white gold, and there was no answer. Around, laced frost melted from the rock. A long, lean pine tree became suddenly bare of crows. The sky became raucously black. A shadow slid to her side, and past it, and Ardacos said softly, “So which would you choose to save: your land or your lineage?”

“I don’t know.”

It had been a vain hope that he might not have been listening. She sat on the crag’s edge and hugged her feet and looked over. Below, small shadows of men crossed the land as Venutios’ hunters worked a deer trail. Ardacos came to sit on a boulder. He was naked and smelled of bear fat and his hair was wild as it was when he had been hunting. She said, “What did you kill?”

“Nothing. I went to meet the bear, not to hunt.”

“Did you find her?”

“No. We’re too far south and the legions have hunted too hard.”

Ardacos pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. He was haggard and tired. Like Venutios, he had aged since the winter and Breaca had not taken time to see it. It was easier to remember him younger, more vital, dancing with a she-bear and her cubs on Mona, than to remember the man who was flogged by Rome and then made himself well enough to fight again less than a month later.

It was easier to remember either of these than the warrior who had nurtured her son for sixteen years and brought him body and soul to the she-bear, because only by that could he grow from the shadow of the Boudica to be all that he needed to be.

Because both Ardacos and the question needed more of
an answer, Breaca said, “It’s not a choice to make now on a bare rock with nothing to give it shape.”

“No. But you are hoping you may never have to make it at all.” Ardacos rose to leave. “You are stronger than that, if I am not. When the time comes, don’t step aside because you are wishing the question would pass you by.”

Venutios was waiting for them by the fire. He was dressed more formally, with a good wool cloak dyed black for Briga and a brooch pin at his shoulder in the shape of the Brigantian horse. A youth stood nearby holding his horse for him. It was Roman bred, with a brand on the left shoulder.

He said, “I must leave, but I have a gift for you, in parting.”

“Your question was its own gift.”

“I know. But that is for later. For now, there are things more pressing. My scouts have been following Paullinus and his legions as they pass down through the lands neighbouring ours. This night, they camped on the borders of the Cornovii and the Coritani. They are being followed, a day behind, by a small party from Mona: a red-haired girl-child and a woman dreamer of the Durotriges, with four other men, one of them a hawk-scout of the Coritani.”

“Your trackers are good.”

“The best.” He smiled diffidently. “Excepting only Ardacos who is exceptional and found us before we found him. What do you know of the elder Cornovii and their worship of the horned god?”

“Very little; the Cornovan dreamers who came to Mona said that they no longer worshipped in the old ways. There were rumours that some of their elders still followed the ancestors’ path, that they gave living men to be the Horned
One and to run with the Hunter in the stars, to bring good fortune for the year after.”

“We have the same rumours. We believe them to be true.” Signals were passing among the Brigantes, of increasing urgency. Venutios’ horse was brought forward. He accepted a hand into the saddle and sent the youth who had held it away.

Leaning down, he said, “Rome has killed all of their younger dreamers who trained on Mona. The elders who have always followed the old ways are in the ascent and they are as desperate as anyone to be rid of the legions; they will do whatever they believe necessary to achieve that. Tonight is the first horned moon since the summer solstice. If they are going to sacrifice anyone, it will be now.”

Breaca took a step back from his horse. Pity showed clear on his face; she had never seen that from him, nor expected it. He said, “I had not thought that the threat to your family would come from the tribes. I’m sorry.”

“Thank you.” The urge to turn and walk away left her rigid. She made herself stand and think and ask the necessary question. “But they won’t take Graine. She’s a child and a woman. She can’t be the god.”

“Not her, no. And some of her party will be safe. They won’t touch the blind dreamer, or the woman dreamer of the Durotriges, although they may wish her to stand as Briga for them, at least for the night; they will see her presence as a gift of the mother. They will never risk the wrath of Mona, so the soon-Elder is safe, but there are two others in the party and either one might suit them. My scouts have not been close enough to find their identities or how the Cornovii might choose between them.”

“Dubornos and Hawk.” She stared past him to his warriors and their impatience to be gone. She said, “Dubornos you know. He came to Mona in the year after me. He was taken captive with Caradoc and came back with Cunomar. The other is a young warrior of the Coritani. He—” A half-thought shifted and took shape. “Hawk. They’ll take Hawk. The Cornovii have been at war with the Coritani as long as we have. They have not yet learned that the tribes must fight together to defeat Rome.”

“The followers of the Horned One think themselves uniquely placed to defeat Rome without help.” Venutios moved his horse back so that they could see past him down the track. Two of his runners were waiting near where it led down from the crag. He said, “Nothing will happen before moonrise. If you will follow my pathmakers, you can reach them by then. It would be good if you had Airmid with you — they hold Nemain as the daughter of their god and would listen to one so closely wedded to her — but there is not time for that. You are the Boudica, given to Briga. They will listen to you. It may be that they will also take heed of what you say.”

“H
AWK?”

Hawk was nowhere. In his place were a dozen warriors, all of middle age, who ringed the road, where there had been nothing but morning mist and boulders and nettles and the signs of the legions’ marching.

There were no women among them, only men, powerfully built and naked but for their knife belts and painted with red clay in straight lines from ankle to brow and armpit to wrist. Their kill-feathers were from a red hen and banded in black down the quills. Their hair was stiff with red ochre and smoothed back in two lines so that they were horned. Their knife belts were of red deerhide, and the knives that hung on them were hilted with antler.

Graine had not seen a naked man since the night of the assault; only now, through panic and nausea, did she realize the constant, quiet effort that had been made to ensure that she did not. Even now, with danger encircling, Dubornos pushed his horse across so that she might not have to look.

He was too late, but he had tried and she loved him for it. She looked down at her horse’s mane and breathed hard through her mouth and felt Bellos’ hand on her back between her shoulder blades, and the urgency in it, and the need not to make a scene.

Newly, Gunovar was near, sitting tall, with her cloak pushed back so that her scars were more readily seen, and the dreamer’s thong from Mona. Throwing her voice out as if she were addressing the elders in the great-house, she said, “We escort the Boudica’s daughter. She has been to Mona for healing after her rape by Rome. She is needed now for her part in the war against the legions. Would you harm her?”

The men swayed back and forth, like birch in a breeze. One to the left, the northern side, said, “Never harm the child of the Boudica.” His voice was thick with the accent of the ancestors, as if he had not lived through the nightmare of Rome, or even the wars between the tribes that came before it.

Gunovar said, “So then we may pass?”

Hawk was there, a long way back, in the trees. Graine saw him, and Dubornos. They turned their heads to look elsewhere.

The red-painted men swayed once more and came back upright again. The north one said, “Daughter to the Boudica may pass. Alone. Or she may wait with you and your men.”

It had never occurred to any of the party from Mona that Efnís, Dubornos or Bellos might be considered to be Gunovar’s men. The strangeness of it echoed amongst them. The deer-elder saw it. He stepped up to Gunovar and raised his hand and set the heel of his palm on her forehead, and then his first two fingers, so that she was left with a smudged
bar and two vertical lines of red clay paint above the dreamer’s thong.

He said, “Given of the god. Given to the god. Marked by Rome and by Mona. Now marked by greater than that. We honour you, if they do not.”

His eyes were deer eyes, wide and brown, but not afraid as deer’s were. He regarded Graine thoughtfully a moment, and then set a small vertical line between her brows. She felt the press of his touch and then a tingling that lasted a long time afterwards where he had left the clay. “Given to the hare-daughter,” he said. “Young, but older inside. Not too young to dance. Better if you come with us and wait with the others.”

He stepped back and looked round at the scrub woods and heather moors beyond. So that his voice carried, he said, “The Coritani will follow.”

Hawk was gone, a shadow somewhere in the trees. Still, there was no doubt that he would follow where Graine went, or that Graine would go where the others were taken.

Gunovar asked, “For what do we wait?”

“Attendance on the god.”

They rode west, hard and fast through the day, and attended the god near dusk in a wooded valley, at the foot of a high limestone crag that fell vertically down. A grave mound of the ancestors sat squat and silent on the western lip and the red-painted deer-warriors would not look at it as they reined in their mounts on the crag head.

The sun was an egg yolk, broken open on the horizon. Rich light spread flatly out, to skim the tops of the trees in the valley below. The white rock was the colour of sulphur,
falling away as if the gods’ axe had split it down to the earth. Graine looked over the edge and felt the dream of herself tumble out into oblivion. She froze, clinging to the saddle, and could not move.

“We can’t go down there.” Bellos said it, who could not see. The nearest deer-men glanced at him sideways with white-rimmed eyes. The leader, who was marked from the others by a single additional red strip that ran upwards from his chin, dismounted and wove a way between the warriors and the sparse young pine that studded the crag’s head.