Dreaming the Eagle

by Manda Scott

  He faltered. He had never been unsure entering his own forge. He was now. “How did you know I was there?” he asked.

  “The fire told me.” Her smile broadened. She was alive with the morning and the thing she had done. It shone from her as if she stood in full sunlight. She said, “The flames moved in the draught as you opened the flap. It had to be someone. When you waited I knew it was you. No-one else has the patience.”

  “You are learning it,” he said. “You haven’t burned your fingers.”

  “Not yet.” She frowned again at the piece on the workbench. “But it is hard and I have to think. You have it without thinking.” She raised her head. “Don’t you want to see what I have made?”

  “What?” He had believed it a secret. It had not occurred to him that he would be allowed to see it. “Yes. Of course.”

  It lay on his workbench, scorching wood already blackened by a hundred other new-cast pieces. He waited while she took the small hand-tongs and dipped it in the quenching bucket. The hiss of steam was one of the keynotes of his life. He closed his eyes and let the sound of it calm him. When he opened them again, Breaca had laid her work out on the bench and was standing by the forging block, waiting for his opinion. With some reluctance, he took his gaze from her face and directed it to his bench and the thing she had made.

  Like the best pieces, it was deceptively simple. At first glance, it was a small spear-head, the length of his middle finger, with a long leaf-shaped blade and a point as sharp as any got from casting. It was a thing of fierce beauty and she had clearly modelled it on the old one he kept in his work bag, which had been made by the ancestors and passed down through her mother’s line to him. He was impressed with the workmanship and the time she had taken to get the proportions right, scaling it up so that the end result was a third bigger than the original. At the same time, he knew a fleeting disappointment that she should have made something as plain as a spear-head in her first casting. He turned it over to examine the back, buying himself time.

  That was when he found the first deception. It was not only a spear-head; when she laid it on the bench, she had placed it carefully so that the back was hidden and he had not seen the detail on the reverse that made it also a brooch, cast in the old style of his forefathers, with a front face that showed to the world and two holes behind for the pin to pass through and hold it in place on the cloak. It was clever, and he felt a surge of warm pride. She had learned better than he had expected from her years of watching and this was as good as anything he could have made at starting. Then, turning it round, he saw the third thing and knew she had surpassed him. Like the best of craftsmen, she had caught life in simplicity, motion in stillness, and what he saw in front of him raised the hairs on his arms. Held one way, it was still a spear, a thing made for a warrior. Held differently, the curved arcs patterning the front face resolved themselves into something quite other. He turned it on his palm to catch the light from the fire. The bronze shimmered in the heat and on the surface, moulded in place, the red kite of the Coritani fell beneath the punishing claws of the small, fierce, yellow-eyed owl that hunts by day—the one that had been the dream of her mother. All winter he had dreamed his vengeance. His daughter had cast it in bronze.

  He stood for a long time in silence. The words of the elder grandmother echoed in his ears. She draws out her dream, as you should do. He raised his eyes. Breaca stood as she had before, her good hand still on the forging block, the other hanging loose at her side. The smile and the colour had drained from her face, leaving her grey with the morning. She would not ask; her pride would not allow it. He must give her what she needed, freely and with integrity, but it was hard to look at it critically, as he would the work of another smith. He forced his eye along the lines, matching and balancing the individual markings with the overall flow. Without thinking, he reached for his polishing sand and smoothed off a blemish on the surface. The involuntary movement of her arm brought him back to himself.

  He laid the piece down again. He owed her honesty; she would expect no less. “It is close to perfect,” he said.

  “But…?”

  “But you didn’t use the drawing tool. The two arcs of the eyes are not quite balanced. This one here”—his finger followed a line on the surface—“does not match the one over here.”

  She had known it. He could see the truth in the tilt of her head and the single vertical line of her frown. “I couldn’t take the tool without you noticing,” she said. “I tried to make one of my own, but it didn’t work.”

  “But still, it is a remarkable piece. And very beautiful.” He reached up to the top shelf for his workbox. The punch that lay in the centre, protected by wool, had as its end-piece the shape of a feeding she-bear, the mark of his family. He held it out to her now. “If you want to use it,” he offered, “it is well worth the mark.”

  It was the best gift he could have given her and she had not expected as much. Her eyes shone and he realized with shock that there were tears at the corners. “Do you think it is good enough?” she asked.

  “I wouldn’t offer if I did not.”

  He passed her his middle hammer. She took the stamp from him and placed it on the front face of the brooch, on a patch of bare metal left free of ornament. The sound rang out like a bell. With the mark in place, the shape of it balanced better so that he wondered if the asymmetry had been more deliberate than she had allowed. Outside, the sun broke over the horizon. A stray shard of sunlight angled in through the doorway and fell on the bench. Eburovic moved the new piece into the path of it so that the owl shone gold. They looked at it together. He said, “Would you wear it now?”

  “No.” She shook her head. He saw her teeth shine white on her lower lip. In some ways she was still a child. “It is not for me.”

  For a moment he thought he was being offered a gift and pleasure welled within him. Then he saw the twin streaks of colour high on her cheekbones, stark against the white of her skin, and, crushingly, he understood. He stared at her in silence.

  With obvious effort she said, “It is a gift for…the one who knew the owl.”

  She was rigid, her voice a drawn thread. Her injured hand was splayed flat on the edge of his workbench, her whole body shivering like a leaf under rain. The vertical line of the frown was etched into her brow, so like her mother. She took a breath to speak again and he silenced her, reaching across the gap between them before it became an impassable gulf. Carefully, because it was clear she was near to breaking and did not want to do so, he wrapped an arm round her shoulder and folded her into him, drawing her down until they sat together in the shadowy corner behind the furnace where she had spent so much time as a child. He stroked her hair, talking to her as he would a newly gentled horse that might still take flight, the rhythm meaning more than the words.

  As the rising sun warmed the frost from the grass and the hens roused themselves from their roost in the granary, she became less stiff under his touch and her breathing, although stilted, felt less forced. He moved her round so her back pressed on his chest and linked his arms in front of her.

  With his face close to her hair, he said, “Breaca, I am sorry. I have spent all winter nursing my own pain and had thought you free of yours. We can talk of your mother, of course we can. We should talk of her. It is only her name we cannot say. Her spirit is still making its way across the gods’ river to the lands of the dead. It won’t reach the far side until we burn her bones at the start of winter a year from her death. Until then, she is finding her path and we should do nothing that might draw her back.”

  “She is already drawn back.” Her body had stiffened again and her voice was wooden. “I have dreamed her. I said her name in my dreams and she came. She keeps coming.”

  He had not expected that. Ice ran in his veins and he fought to keep himself from stiffening as she had. His mind groped for a response. “What does she say?” he asked, eventually.

  “What she always said: that only the gods know th
e future and it is not for me to judge them; that I should not bear anger towards the Coritani, for they are not our true enemies. She said the council was right when they decided not to attack in the winter and that I should use my voice to warn against it when we meet again in the spring.” She softened a little, letting her head tip back on his shoulder. “I don’t want to do that.”

  “No. But it would be a good thing to say, and they will listen to you. You are her daughter and will one day lead in her place. And you’re a warrior now. They respect you.”

  “I know.”

  She spoke with a new and unexpected gravity. In killing her attacker, his daughter had made of herself a warrior and earned a place on the council ahead of her time. It was a thing unknown in living memory but it was not unique. Once or twice in the tales of the heroes and their deeds there occurred a child who had killed young and gone on to greater things. They had no singer—her mother had been that—but there were those who knew the tales and could speak them well and it seemed each one who rose to speak in the slow nights of winter had picked a tale of a young-made hero. Eburovic, who knew the tales they chose not to tell, of those who killed young and died young and left no-one to mourn them, had listened with mixed feelings and nursed his own thoughts. Only now, looking back, he saw the shadows that had gathered around his daughter.

  “Did your mother tell you to make the brooch?” he asked. “Or the elder grandmother?”

  “No. It was Airmid’s idea. She understands.”

  Airmid; the tall, silent, dark-haired girl, recently passed into womanhood and accepted as a true dreamer by the elders. In the autumn, before the Coritani attack, she had not been a special friend. That, too, had developed over the winter without his knowing. He reached up and lifted the brooch from the workbench and pressed it into her palm. “We could go this morning. If we ride now, we would reach the platform and be back before the morning is half over.”

  “I can’t. It’s dawn. I have to see to the grandmother. I’m late already.”

  For two years, his daughter had served as eyes and limbs to the elder grandmother, taking the hardship from the old woman’s mornings and giving the strength of youth to her days. To be chosen to serve was a great honour but it was also a great constraint. He had watched with amusement, seeing his daughter settle into it as a half-broken colt settles into the harness, chafing at the ties and testing the limits. Of late, she had been more conscientious.

  She began to pull herself to her feet. He felt something important slide away from him, like a fish in the river. Drawing her back into his embrace, he said, “No. Airmid was the grandmother’s eyes and limbs before you. This once, could she not be so again?”

  “Maybe.” She turned to look up at him. Her face was wet but her smile was steady. “If she knew why.”

  “Will she be at the river?”

  “Not yet. She’s in the west house.”

  “I see.” He did not ask how she knew. The west house was the place where the young women of childbearing age slept who had not yet taken a man. The young men of similar age slept in the south. The roundhouse in the centre was for families and the elderly. Eburovic felt another tradition sway in the storm of his family’s passing; it was not expected that a man visit the west house uninvited. This morning was, he believed, a time of exceptions. He stood, releasing his daughter. “I’ll go and talk to Airmid,” he said. “You get the harness and catch the horses. I’ll meet you at the lower paddocks.”

  They met as the sun touched the lower branches of the hawthorn tree in the corner of the field. Airmid had agreed to tend to the elder grandmother and the old woman had accepted the alteration to her routine. On the way through the compound, he picked up his good cloak and found Breaca had been before him, collecting her own and changing her old tunic for her new one, woven in the blue of the Eceni with a coiled pattern in a darker tone worked along the border. He fixed his sword on his back and gathered his spear and his war shield with its iron boss and the mark of the she-bear poker-burned on the bull’s-hide surround. The extra weapons were not necessary but he had not travelled to the platform since it was first built and he felt a need to go in ceremony.

  He walked up to the lower paddocks and found that Breaca, thinking with him, had caught the roan horse he rode to war and had spent her time cleaning the burrs and mud from its coat. Beside him, surprisingly, an iron-grey filly with a flesh mark on her muzzle and an eel stripe down the centre of her back stood bridled and ready. He looked out across the paddock at the two dozen well-handled horses, any one of which would have come readily enough to the call. Breaca flashed him a look that was both challenge and apology. “She will be good,” she said. “Almost as good as the roan. She needs time before she comes to trust anyone.”

  He could believe it. He would have sold the filly at the autumn horse fair but she had kicked the first few who came near her and the rest had kept their distance afterwards so that he had been forced to withdraw her unsold. He had turned her away for the winter, thinking to work on her when the ground softened in spring. Someone had been there ahead of him. Smiling, his daughter said, “She hasn’t tried to unman anyone recently. If you lead the roan out first, you will be safe. She will follow where he goes.”

  “If you say so.”

  They led the horses to the trackway that ran between the paddocks. Eburovic clicked the roan to a trot and ran alongside for a few paces. When the rhythm was right, he grabbed a handful of mane and made the warrior’s mount onto its back. In the height of summer, with some time to practise, he could do it fully armed with his sword free in one hand and his spear in the other, knowing that if he misjudged his timing he would kill himself or maim a horse he loved. Now it was enough that his sword was in its sheath on his back and his spear hand also held his shield. He settled in the saddle, moving the shield to his arm. The blood rushed in his ears and he heard within it the sound of hoofbeats hammering the earth behind him. Spinning the roan, he saw the grey throw herself into a canter. He was reaching down for the bridle, ready to head her off, when he saw Breaca, running on the spear side, reach up for the mane. She was wrong-sided and wrong-footed—and she mounted with perfect timing. The smile she threw him then was a reflection of the morning. He found himself grinning back even as his horse matched hers at the canter. “Can you do that with a spear in your hand?” He shouted it over the drumming of hooves.

  “I think so.”

  “Here, then.” It was his war spear, slimmer and lighter than the boar spear she had killed with but with a longer reach and a blade honed to pierce metal. He tossed it across the gap, keeping the point high. She caught it one-handed and slid to the ground, ran for three paces, then, using the spear as a lever with the butt end planted briefly in the turf, vaulted back up. The grey never broke stride. Eburovic smiled and made a gesture of approval. Breaca laughed and spun the spear in the air and then, just for the show of it, she did it again on the shield side. Eburovic watched and tried to recall whether she had been able to do it like that before the winter. He believed not. Thinking back, he tried to remember if he had been able to do it on both sides at the age of twelve, the age she was now. He was almost sure that he had.

  The grey was not battle-hardened. The feel of the spear whistling close to her head pushed her into a gallop. They ran free for a while, drawing the horses in the fields on either side to race with them, then curved in a circle and pulled back down the paces to a walk. It was the first ride of the spring, and it did not do to press the horses too hard. Eburovic dropped the reins and let his mount pick the way, feeling the glory of the morning. He had spent the winter existing, not living. Today, for the first time since the autumn, he felt glad to be alive. The air was bright and sharp, cold enough to crisp the hairs in his nose as he breathed in, but not so cold that it stiffened his fingers. Around him, spring was breaking the grip of winter. The first catkins hung on the willow, dusted with frost. Birch trees bore new leaves, unfurling them before the rising sun. Whitet
horn flowers, tight in bud, scattered the hedges like the last remnants of snow.

  The horses were losing their winter coats. The roan walked with his head up and his ears pricked, the way he walked to war. The filly nudged up beside him and did not roll her eyes when Eburovic leaned over to scratch mud from her neck. Breaca moved her on until they rode knee to knee. She was more sober now, not stiff with shock and the aftertaste of dreams as she had been in the forge, but neither was she showing the wild exuberance of the early gallop. There was a sense of containment to her that was new to him. He thought of the warrior’s mount she had made and the neatness of it. His daughter of a year ago would not have put in the hours of practise needed to get the timing right. It brought to mind the furnace she had built in the forge, with the edges banked high to turn the heat inwards. Before her mother’s death, she had been a blazing hearth fire, sparking at random with a vivid, careless joy. Now, she could melt her own core if she chose to. The image nagged at him, taking the edge from the morning. He turned it over in his mind. Too often, he had seen what happened to a vessel stoked over-hot, or a mould poured without air vents. Eburovic rode in silence beside his daughter and made a silent prayer to the gods that she would find a way to let out the fire before it consumed her.

  The horses nodded on. Eburovic guided the roan with his knees, remembering. The last time he had come this way he had been on foot, supporting Graine, walking at her side, fearful that the child might come before they reached the place he had made for her. She had smiled her singular smile and promised him it would not and, because it was her second, he had tried to believe her. Breaca had still been a child then; she had run on ahead, searching the paddock edges for late mushrooms, bringing them back to him in dirty handfuls. Graine had taken them, and later had found room in a different pouch for the strange-shaped pebble that might, from certain angles, have looked like a lizard’s head and the dried casting from an owl that showed the bones of what it had eaten. Both of those had stayed with her body afterwards, making playthings for the crows.