Dreaming the Eagle

by Manda Scott

  “I don’t know.” He frowned, trying to remember. In the dream, he had known exactly what it was. It had made sense of everything else. Now it was simply a patch in the shape of a warrior’s shield that had shown him something else in reflection. He struggled and failed and saw the effort reflected in his mother’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t remember.”

  His mother had picked up the hound puppy now and was rubbing its chest absently, her gaze still on her son. One of the grandmothers rapped her shoulder and, without looking up, she handed the whelp across the smoke. Breaca took it and began to breathe for it, pressing her mouth to its muzzle and blowing deep into its chest. Someone must have taught her that, and recently; she hadn’t known how to do it for the colt foal that had died by the stream. One of the other women lifted a fold of her cloak and began to rub hard over the whelp’s heart. Something had changed. They were going to bring it back. He wanted to watch, to help, but his mother lifted him round to sit opposite her, with his back to the bitch and the pup. “Tell me the dream,” she said.

  He told her as much as he could remember. It took less time than it had taken to dream it. At the end, he could still not tell her what it was he had seen when the horse turned its head. Only the feeling of it was left with him and he had few enough words for that.

  “Did you feel afraid?”

  “No. The first time I did, but not the second time. I knew I had nothing to fear.”

  “Not even when the sword struck you?”

  “No.” That puzzled him. He should have been afraid of the sword. But then he had been a warrior in battle and his father had told him that, in the frenzy of fighting, some warriors passed beyond their fear. He looked down at his left arm. It was as whole as the other. “Maybe I knew it wasn’t real.”

  “Maybe.” She didn’t believe it. Across the fire, something was whimpering, faintly, like the wind in a reed. The old bitch lifted her head and grumbled a greeting. The pup was rubbed one final time and placed in the fall of her teats. She licked it hard, pushing it up and in. It mewled and pawed and had no idea how to suck.

  “He will have to be fed.” His mother stretched forward and pressed the hindmost teat between finger and thumb. When the first bead of milk appeared, she held the pup to it, smearing its lips with white. It mumbled and sucked and, the second time, did it more strongly.

  The elder grandmother spoke. Her voice was the rustle of dead leaves in winter. “The boy had the dream. The whelp is his to rear.” She turned to Bán. Her eyes scored his face. “He will not live without help. Will you give it?”

  “Yes.” He had no doubts about that. He said, “His name is Hail.”

  That sealed it. To name a thing gave it life. His mother took hold of his arm. “For the first half-moon, they feed more often than not, through the night as well as the day. I will show you how. If you can do it, the whelp will live. If not, he will die. If he dies, it is the will of the gods and you are not to blame yourself. Is that clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “Swear to me that you won’t blame yourself.”

  He swore. He swore by Briga, the threefold Mother, and her daughter, Nemain, the moon, and by the smaller gods of childbirth and rearing. Then, because the whelp was a dog and not a bitch, he swore also by Belin god of the sun, and by Camul the war god. It was a long and complicated oath and at the end of it he remembered that he was not swearing to stay awake and keep the whelp alive but rather not to blame himself if it died. He spoke that aloud, to make it clear.

  His mother was smiling when he had finished. She held out her hand and lifted him up. “Come, then, I’ll show you how it is done. And then we’ll find you somewhere to live with her so you don’t keep us all awake through the night with your nursing.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Eburovic woke with the moon. A dazzle of silver slid through the gap between the door-skin and the oak upright and glanced across his eyes, interrupting the dream. He lay still, listening. The night was quiet. He had been dreaming of danger and the echo of it fogged his thinking. The hushed breath of the other sleepers made a blanket of sound layered over the night’s smoke to deaden his ears. He turned his head and heard the whine of a hound and the scratch and scurry of rodents. Elsewhere, in the world beyond the thatch, an owl screeched and was answered. He heard it and waited; these were the sounds with which he slept nightly and none of them had woken him. Lying still, he stopped his breathing and strained to catch the things beyond the smoke. In time, it came again, the subtle chink of iron on iron, such as a careless man might make, allowing his sword to clash on his shield hub, or his armour to grate as he climbed a rampart to attack those sleeping within. But Eburovic was not asleep. For six months, he had not truly slept, waiting for such a moment as this. Feeling something close to joy, he reached down for the sword that had been within a hand’s reach day and night since the Coritani attack. His hand closed on the grip, settling in place as if born to it, and he drew the blade from the sheath. Polished iron slid on oiled bull’s hide and made no more noise than the sleepers. Still, he was heard.

  “Your daughter is at her work early.”

  He stopped. The joy left him. The whisper came from his left, from amongst the women. It was dry, like the brush of wind over stone. He peered into the gloom. The embers of last night’s fire gave little light but he saw a bent shape move in the darkness and the reflected glimmer of milkblind eyes and knew who it was. The elder grandmother was erratic and harsh with her words but he had never known her to speak without reason. Certainly she had never lied to him. He sat down on the edge of his bed and laid his naked blade flat across his knees.

  “What work is that, Grandmother?” His own voice was pitched to move through the breathing, to reach her but not wake the others.

  “How would I know that? You must ask her.”

  Her tone was scathing, but he had learned long ago to listen beyond the acid of the words to the silences that carried the real meaning. He did so now. “What work is it that must be done in darkness and alone?”

  “She draws out her dream, as you should do,” said the old woman. “It does not pay a man, or a child, to dream too often of violence.”

  He was silent for that. His dream had been the same every night since the autumn. In it, he slept with his sword in his hand, not hanging from the wall, and he did not keep apart from the women, for all that Graine was in the first throes of childbirth. He heard the warriors approach before they began the work of killing and he was there in time, standing in their path, swinging sharp and savage iron to halt their advance. In his dream none died but the Coritani. The first three fell to his hammer and his blade combined, long before they reached the women. The last, as in reality, died on his daughter’s spear. He ended each night standing in a doorway facing her across the body of the fallen man, feeling the simmering ecstasy of battle ring through his head and pride fill his heart. The dawn sun sang in over his shoulder, setting fire to her hair, her smile, her shining spear-tip. She raised her weapon in salute and he thought his heart would burst with the joy of it. Then, always, he saw her eyes. In life, they were a burnished green with small threads of copper spreading out from the core, a colour all their own. Here, from the doorway of his dream, he looked into the late-summer blue of her mother’s eyes and the smile that fired them was the one that had burned into his heart long before he became a father. It was the smile that made him remember his loss and brought back the crippling grief. Weeping, he watched his daughter open her mouth and knew that she spoke with the voice of her mother. He strained to hear but her words were lost in the tides of pain and always he woke before they could reach him. Now he sat in the dark and felt the ache as he had each morning, made greater this time by the understanding that Breaca, too, had dreamed of the deaths and he had not known.

  “It is not a good thing for a child to dream so,” he said.

  “She knows it. She is working as she feels she must. It is not for you to stop her.”

>   “No.” He eased his blade back into its sheath and stood. His tunic lay folded on his bed-skins. He slid it over his head.

  “You would go to her?” The ancient voice nagged like an aching tooth and the scorn was directed entirely at him. “Would she work in the dark if she wanted you?”

  “I woke early from my dream,” he said, and realized that it was the first time he had done so. “Perhaps I need to see what she is doing.”

  “She is teaching herself patience.” The grandmother dismissed it as nothing. Both of them knew it was not. “It is not before time.”

  “Then I will look. I will offer help only if she asks for it. I will do nothing to stop her.” He stepped past the fire to the door-skin. An elderly bitch thought to follow. He pushed on her muzzle and turned her back. She padded away to his sleeping place and dug herself a bed amongst his hides. He waited until she had settled and then let himself out.

  The forge stood away from the roundhouse, on the far side of the compound, with its front entrance facing south so that sparks from the fire might not, in dry weather, set fire to the thatch of the roundhouse and cause ruin. The building itself was made of wood with slatted hazel for the roof, and he wet it himself regularly so that it would not burn. The floor was beaten earth, damped and trodden and glazed by the fire until it was flat and imperviously smooth, except at the doorway where the hens had scraped a dust bowl and lay in it on occasion, basking in the heat.

  There were no hens at night. They had roused themselves at dusk, pecking their way with the last of the light to the safe roost under the eaves of the granary, and he had sealed the door-skin behind them, laying a row of river stones along the skirt, so that the furnace, free of draught, might keep its heat through to the dawn. Coming on it now in the light of the moon, Eburovic saw the haze rising straight from the smoke hole and knew the fires were not sleeping. At the door-flap, he found that the stones had been laid aside, arranged in order of size more neatly than was his habit, and that the skirt had been turned inwards with a single weight holding it down from the inside. He stood for a moment with his ear pressed to the leather but heard nothing. If Breaca had been using his hammer, she was not doing so now.

  He eased a hand round the edge of the skin, putting his face to the gap and bracing himself for a blast of heat that never came. He was pleased with that. It was, after all, his daughter who worked his forge and he had taught her well; she knew how to build a fire, stoking it small and hot and banking the edges so that the heat turned in on itself and was not thrown out to cook the night air. Still, it was bright inside. As his eyes adjusted to the flames, he saw she had built a fire made for casting; the banked edges were higher than he made them for forging and the charcoal at the core glowed white, falling away in white ash and small puffs of smoke. A mould stood in the heart of the fire, not one of his. Breaca crouched before it with her back to him. The backwash of light from the fire caught the deep bronze of her hair and made of it molten copper, pouring down past her shoulders. When she stood up and reached for the bellows, he saw that she wore her old tunic with the burn marks already ancient on the front of it, and covering that, the apron of boiled ox-hide he had made for her the previous summer. The apron was too small for her now, he could see that. In the six months of winter, under his gaze but without his seeing, his daughter had grown to a woman. He wondered how close she was to her first bleeding and knew, suddenly, that this was why she was here. It could not have started yet, or she would be in the care of the grandmothers, but it would be soon.

  The bellows sighed as she pumped. The fire cracked and roared and the mould at its centre glowed white hot. Eburovic watched his daughter lift his longest tongs, the ones that he had made himself to let him work with the hottest iron. With care, she edged them forward, past the mould to a crucible of molten metal. He had not seen her do this before. He held his breath, watching the surface of the liquid bronze, praying that he had taught her properly—that she knew the importance of keeping her hands steady. Even if she knew, he was not sure she could do it. Her left hand was still the weaker of the two. The sword wound she had taken at her mother’s death had healed poorly over the winter. The elder grandmother had spent some time on it in the dark nights of midwinter, opening the wound and probing with a newly forged silver needle until she found a fragment of bone loose inside. His daughter had sat on the bench they had laid for her, white-lipped and silent. Her green eyes had held his, still as frozen water, and he had been proud as the needle-work started that they had stayed dry. Her free hand had gripped his arm while the probing continued and he had not noticed the strength of it until later. The bruises had taken five nights to fade.

  Afterwards, with poultices and care, the wound had begun to knit properly but a scar that would last a lifetime ran down the centre of her palm and a greater separation than normal showed between the first finger and the rest. More than that, the hand did not work as it used to and Breaca was not one to take incapacity lightly. She had fretted daily under the ministrations of the grandmother, trying too hard to accomplish with one hand the things she had never quite been able to do with two. When the poultice came off, she had begun work in earnest. With an aching heart, he had watched her walking the fields or the encircling rampart, flexing her fingers against a wad of old leather, biting back on the pain until it bleached the colour from her skin and brought tears to her eyes. On the one occasion when he had asked her to stop, she had rounded on him, weeping openly, and spat out that if her mother could take the pain of childbirth, she could take the lesser pain of an injured hand. At the time, he had been shocked to find her so angry. Looking back, he realized that it was the only time he had seen her weep.

  In the forge, he saw her lift the crucible and then the mould to the edge of the fire. Even from the door, he could see the tremor in the last few movements. With relief, he watched her lay down the tongs and flex her fingers. She tried again and the shaking was worse. He could feel the tension growing in her spine. She shook her head crossly. He heard the hiss of her breath over the draw of the fire and the muttered curse that followed. In his mind, he saw her knock the mould at the crucial point of pouring. Molten metal flowed out across her legs, seeking out the places the apron no longer covered, making wounds that even the elder grandmother could not heal. He eased his arm through the door-flap, reaching down to lift the weight that held it, intent on going in to help. As his hand closed on the copper disc, the memory of a whispered conversation came back to him: Would she work in the dark if she wanted you? and his own reply, Then I will look. I will offer help only if she asks for it. I will do nothing to stop her.

  I will do nothing to stop her. It had not been intended as an oath but words spoken in the dark to the elder grandmother were not to be discarded lightly. The gods do not look favourably on a man who breaks his word and no smith can afford to court their disfavour for the sake of it, still less one who has so recently known such loss. He withdrew his arm and let go of the door-skin, keeping only such a gap as allowed him to see. By the fire, his daughter bent her head and drew in a longer breath, letting it out slowly. With great care she put both hands to the tongs and lifted them horizontally. When it was clear that the tips were steady, she slid them forward into the fire, grasping the neck of the crucible, lifting it just high enough to broach the lip of the mould. The pour was smooth. A thin stream of liquid bronze flowed into the cavity she had made for it. Eburovic heard the hiss and sigh of the air from the side vents and the part of him that lived for his craft gave her due credit for placing them properly. The part of him that was a father stopped breathing until the crucible was empty. Then she tapped the mould three times with the hammer to knock out the air bubbles and the danger was over. It had been done neatly and well. He breathed again.

  The mould cooled slowly. The time from pouring the metal to cracking the mould open had always been the hardest part for her. Of his three children, Breaca was the worst for acting on impulse. Twice as a child she had reac
hed forward too soon and had had to be taken afterwards to the elder grandmother to have the scorched flesh bound with dock leaves and fennel root to keep it from festering. Now she stood slowly, easing the cramped muscles of her thighs, and began to tidy the tools of her working. As a man in a dream, Eburovic watched the care with which the tongs were hung back on the wall and the hammer laid in its rack by the files. His daughter, his impetuous, impatient fire-child, had never been one to care about order. Since she was old enough to come to the forge to watch him and “help,” he had been mentioning, quietly, that certain things lived in certain places and it would be good, perhaps, at the end of a day’s work, to put them back there. Always she had turned the great green gaze on him and grinned and promised “later” and run out to play in the paddocks or to find her mother or to attend to the dozen other things that needed her urgent attention, leaving her father to put things in order. He had persuaded himself, as he did it, that with enough nagging she might one day remember what it was to hang up a hammer. He had never thought to see it done so easily.

  The piece was nearly ready. She stood over it, frowning as she watched the surface of the metal, waiting for the scum on the surface to harden. The fire, unfed, grew cooler, throwing redder light and softer shadows into the corners of the forge, drawing out the autumn tones of her hair and her eyebrows, making of the rest a silhouette. In profile, she was her mother. The high, flat brow led directly to the sweep of her hair. The nose was straight and firm, balancing the strong line of her jaw and the broad set of her cheekbones. Her skin was darker than Graine’s had been. She had that from her father: the ability to darken a little in the sun, not to the bark-brown of Macha and Bán, but neither to the sun-shy red of her mother. With age, he felt, she would be grateful for that. She had his height, too. He could tell, even now, that she had taken more of that from him than either of his other children and that, when grown, she and Bán would be of a height, with Silla that little bit shorter. When she stood and reached back for his smallest hammer, he could believe, in the lines of her movement, that she was growing into her mother’s grace. Then he watched her take a breath before she tapped the mould and the curve of her smile cut his heart in two. The hammer fell, splitting the mould, giving birth to the shining metal. His daughter raised her head and looked him straight in the eye, still smiling in the way she had in his dream. “You can come in now,” she said. “It’s finished.”