by Manda Scott
On the third, halfway across the river, she turned back to look at the wood. The beech that had held her was shrouded in mist, as forbidding as it had been since she first arrived. The far bank, by contrast, was clear and inviting, the ground was sandy and free of dead leaves, and winter grass rippled under a light breeze. As she watched, a water rat threaded through the reeds and paused to look at her, its eyes bright in the starlight. It was the first living thing she had seen since walking out of the gates, and for one appalling moment it seemed possible that this was it, that she was going to return not only smelling of rancid bear fat but with the water rat as her dreaming. Her mind sang, cluttered suddenly with the grandmother’s tales of others whose arrogance had brought them dreams they did not want. Even the least of them had not dreamed a rat. She swayed on the stone, light-headed with fear, paralysed in ways she had not been by the Coritani spearman or Amminios and his sword.
Then a white owl screeched close by in the woods, a dog fox barked and a vixen answered, a stag grunted in the far distance and suddenly the night was alive with all the things that had been missing. The rat stayed a moment longer and vanished. It gave no message and was, therefore, neither her dream nor her dreaming. The shock of relief crushed the air from her chest, leaving her dizzy. In a burst of unstable energy, she ran the last half-dozen strides to the far side of the river, skidding on the crossing stones, throwing herself with outstretched arms onto the crumbling sand of the bank. She collapsed onto the turf, breathing in ragged bursts, laughing and crying together, weeping her thanks to the gods and the rat and the river. Only later, as she calmed, did she remember something Airmid had said, long ago, in the summer. Be careful of the river. It is not for nothing that men say it has the power to drive women mad. Don’t cross when the moon is on it if you don’t have to.
Wiping her face, she made herself sit upright and look at the water. White foam curled innocently around the margins of the stones. The truncated circle of the moon lipped at the one on which she had been standing. She could return. If pressed, she would do so, but it would be better to do it in daylight, or later at night when the moon had passed on. In the meantime, she was free to follow the call of the Hunter. Standing, she put her back to the river and set off east, towards the dawn.
Without the rain, the night was surprisingly warm. She crossed scrubland too poor for horses but with signs that deer had grazed on it recently. Stunted hawthorn and rowan, growing singly or in small stands, dropped leaves in the breeze as she passed. Islands of gorse and broom grew more strongly; the late flowers of the gorse glowed faintly yellow in the starlight. Everywhere, the land was completely flat, without even the gentle undulations of the paddocks beyond the roundhouse. The mound was the only feature: a dark, brooding bulk that became darker and more brooding as she approached. She did not make for it directly, but it was in her path and she made no effort to avoid it. Even so, she might have passed it by without a second glance had not the clouds split apart as she came near and the full moon burst through, flooding the mound and the land around it with light.
It was not a beautiful sight, but it was arresting. She stopped and drew breath once at the spectacle of it and then again, more sharply, at the sight of the great stone that stood at the mound’s end. It was granite, which was not common: a single slab of it taller than she was by a spear’s length and half a spear wide, tapering to a rounded point. From a distance, it had the same proportions as the spear-head in her pouch, but it was not the size that caught her eye, that brought her up close to run exploring fingers across the surface, but the markings on it. There, at a height level with her eyes, was boldly carved the sign of the serpent-spear, the one the grandmother had painted on Breaca’s shield and the shoulder of her horse as she rode out to greet the Trinovantes on the gods’ day in the summer. She ran a finger along the lines, cleaning the edges. It was not newly cut, nor was it, on close inspection, as deep as it had first looked. The whole thing, from the end of the serpent’s head to its tail, was the length of her hand, and the lines had been softened by generations of sun and wind and rain and the furred coverings of lichen. Had it not been for the high angle of the moon, she would have missed it altogether.
“Is it a good likeness?”
Breaca spun round, her knife coming clean of the sheath even as her ears made sense of the words. The elder grandmother stood behind her, grinning as she did whenever she had caused the greatest discomfort in those around her. She was not dressed as she had been in the women’s place. She was, in fact, not dressed at all but for an elaborate necklace of eagle skulls and fox teeth that clattered on her breastbone. Her thighs were slickly wet almost to the hip, as if she had crossed the river elsewhere than the stepping stones and had misjudged the depth of it. Her eyes, caught in shadow, were black.
“It has taken you long enough to find the place. I was beginning to think I would have to seek you out.” The grandmother cocked her head. “Did you bring my spearhead with you?”
“Is it yours? I thought…yes, I have it here.”
She was too shocked to answer more fully. Nothing, none of the lessons, none of the elliptic conversations with Airmid, had prepared her for this. She reached in her pouch and brought out the gift Bán had given her. She had taken it lightly but now did not want to part with it. The grandmother took it and turned it over in her hand.
“Good.”
She handed it back. Breaca received it with relief. The grandmother smiled again, brightly. Her step was light, as if, by shedding her clothes, she had shed many of her years. “Come. You are late and there is a great deal to see.”
Reality moved back another pace. The old woman stepped round behind the standing stone and vanished, much as the water rat had done. When Breaca did not follow she called, sharply, in a voice of fast-waning patience, “Come. Quickly. You’re wasting time.”
It was not good to try the grandmother’s temper. Breaca stepped round the standing stone, sucking in a breath to squeeze into the narrow space between the rock and the grass of the mound. On the far side, she let the breath out again, sharply, and grabbed for the support of the standing stone. Her stomach lurched as she stared down at where the ground should be and saw only space. Here, hidden from prying eyes, was the entrance to the mound: a shelving pit that slanted down and into the earth, its walls bounded by more slabs of granite. The grandmother waited inside it, glaring.
It had taken more courage than Breaca knew she possessed to face the water rat. Entering the mound was easy by comparison. It was not, as she might have expected, a cave of earth, but rather a wide, open-ended tunnel lined with cut and dressed stone. Standing at the entrance, she could see through the length of it to the shadowed scrub at the far side. Moonlight leaked in from both sides so that the interior was no darker than the roundhouse in an evening. She stepped slowly in. Three steps led down the entrance slope, all of stone and all worn by many generations of passing feet. It felt good to be walking in the tracks of the ancestors. She caught up with the grandmother, who turned and led the way inside.
The interior of the mound was surprisingly dry. Outside, the world was saturated after two nights of steady rain. Here, on the inside, the great slabs of the walls and ceiling fitted so closely together that neither earth nor water could seep between them and the packed earth beneath her feet was parched as in the height of summer, crumbling to dust between her toes. Here, too, were worn the grooves of many generations’ passing, although in the tunnel they ran parallel, as if those walking here had done so in pairs, shoulder to shoulder, or else had kept to one side going in and the other coming out. Breaca kept to the left, the shield side, out of instinct, her hand on the hilt of her knife. The grandmother walked ahead of her in the centre, ignoring the long-trodden paths.
The exit came soon and without any sign of the honoured dead of which Airmid had spoken. Breaca followed the grandmother up three steps into full moonlight. The land beyond was unremarkable. Scrub stretched away to the horizon. The r
iver foamed and sang to their left. To the right grew a thick hedge of gorse. Breaca was looking for a way to get past it when the grandmother tapped her on the arm and, crouching, motioned her forward to a fox run that was wide enough to crawl through. The grandmother was small and naked and came through unscathed. Breaca had her tunic for protection but still emerged with long scores on either arm and a triangular tear on her shin.
She drew breath to speak, to advise that they walk round the hedge when they left, or at the very least to ask that she be allowed to go first with a knife on the return journey. The words were not formed when the grandmother clamped the claw of her hand across her mouth and forced her to silence. She pressed her lips to Breaca’s ear. Her voice was a breath of wind. “Say nothing. There are men in the hollow. If they know you are here, they will kill you.” She unclamped her hand. In the moonlight, her eyes shone yellow, like a hawk’s.
Breaca had not noticed a hollow. She looked for it now, lying flat on her stomach in the shadow of the gorse. Creeping forward, she saw a wide, round-ended valley sunk into the earth like a bowl to feed the gods, the slopes of it lush with grass and berried rowan. A small stream threaded down one side and spilled into a pool on the valley’s floor. Near the centre, a fire burned with high, leaping flames. Two men stood on either side of it, each with a stock of dried boughs.
More men walked in from the east down a path that coursed alongside the stream. They were small men, the tallest no bigger than the elder grandmother and some not even that. Had they been clothed Breaca might have believed them children but, like the grandmother, they were naked, brown-skinned and dark-haired, and all were assuredly adult. She saw no women. From a place behind the rowans, a dozen of them dragged a vast cooking bowl, of a size to feed an entire roundhouse, and set it to heat on the fire. Presently, rising smoke carried to Breaca the mellow, meaty smell of bear fat, boiling.
The taller of the two fire-keepers gave his place to another and went to draw water from the pool, carrying it up in an oversized ale jug. When added to the larger bowl, the water hissed and made steam. On the ninth such journey, the taller man stood over the bowl and began to speak. Breaca could hear the tone of his voice, faintly mournful, like birdsong at dusk, but not the words. As he stopped speaking, the water hissed violently and fell silent.
A third man, one with a sun symbol drawn in yellow on his chest, was called forward to tip the contents of a belt pouch into the mix. He stirred it using the butt end of a spear and the smell ripened, gathering the tannin of hawthorn berries and the sweet-sour of spoiled hay until it settled to something Breaca recognized; they were mixing woad, the most sacred of plants, guardian of warriors and women in childbirth. Her mind was drifting, bringing images of the serpent-spear on her shield and the preparations for her mother’s childbirth, when it came to her, suddenly, that she was watching one of the men’s rites and that it was forbidden, absolutely, by all the laws of gods and dreamers, for any woman even to think of it, still less to lie on the damp turf and watch while it happened. In panic, she thrust an arm across her eyes and began to squirm backwards. The grandmother’s claw clamped her wrist, holding her still. The whispered voice was acidly painful, for all that she could barely hear it. “Would I bring you here did the gods not permit it? You will stay. There are things you must see.”
She stayed. She had no choice. Beneath her, the last of the men had entered the hollow. Their exact numbers were hard to count but thirty or more gathered close to the fire and a handful of others squatted by the stream. At a signal from the fire-tenders, spear-hafts were brought from the shade of the rowan and distributed, one to each. Spearheads of stone were collected from a central pile, chosen with care so that, even when each warrior had taken the best he could find, there were as many left behind that were not quite perfect.
The leading fire-tender turned to the group and clapped his hands. As one, each man knelt with his right knee to the earth, settled the spear-haft across his left thigh and bound spear-head to haft with a leather thong taken from his hair. They worked quickly and in silence. At the end of it, the leader clapped again. The warriors stood and made a ring round the fire. Names were called in the same fluting birdsong. At the sound of each one, a man stepped forward, presenting himself and his weapon to the cauldron and the keepers who stood beside it. What came next stopped Breaca’s breath in her throat. The vat had not seemed big enough to take a whole man, but she saw each of the warriors step in and duck down until only the top of his hair was visible, and when they stepped out they were no longer men but glistening half-ghosts, silvered grey to match the coming dawn, sliding as wraiths through the mist rising up from the stream. They gathered at the shores of the pool, taking care not to enter the water, standing in silent ranks with their spears held away from their bodies. There were seven yet to enter the vat when the first bloodred edge of the sun lifted over the eastern horizon. Seeing it, one of the men set up a song in a minor key with many repetitions. Before the second phrase, the others had joined in.
Breaca felt the grandmother stir. Her voice was less harsh than it had been, and more easily heard. In all the noise down below, they could speak aloud without risk of detection. “Look at the patterns,” said the grandmother. “It is the pattern that matters.”
She looked. The woad gave the grey, Airmid had taught her that; when mixed with melted bear grease or horse fat, it turned a warrior’s skin to the silvered, trout-belly grey that offered perfect camouflage at dawn or dusk. The heroes of the past had used it often; the singers’ tales told of them rising like ghosts from the mists of a river to confront their enemies. In the dark of the night, Breaca had not seen beyond the transformation it wrought on the men. Now, looking with care and with the added light of the dawn, she saw that the fire-leaders had used also the blue woad, mixed perhaps with spit or egg white, to draw signs on chest or back, or, in a few cases, the forearms of the warriors. It took a long time before the patterns became anything more than random lines. It was only when the men lined up again by the fire, closer and all together, that she saw what they were.
“They are wearing the serpent-spear. The sign you put on my shield.” Breaca felt stupid for not having seen it sooner. She said, “It is different. Not as you drew it.”
“No. In this, the serpent head is on both ends, facing both left and right, looking back and looking forward. For these men, that which has happened is as important as that which is to come. The past carries the seeds of the future and both must be honoured. For you, it will be the same. When you return, you will repaint the sign on your shield to match this one.”
“Is it my sign?” She felt a spasm of the old fear. The spear was not a living thing. It could not talk to her in the dream the way the frogs spoke to Airmid or the wren to Macha.
The grandmother was ruthless. “It is yours until you earn another. Now look at the leader.”
The fire-leader entered the cauldron last. He drew his own sign, working on his forearms. Breaca saw the outline as he began and her heart leaped, knowing it. “Is it a hare? The leader has the sign of the hare?” The hare was Nemain’s beast, as sacred as the wren. It could cross between the worlds at will, carrying word from the gods to the people and back. Only in her moments of greatest hope had Breaca imagined the hare might be her dreaming.
The elder grandmother said, “Yes, it is a hare. He has earned it. It may save him yet. Watch, now. They are nearly ready.”
The old woman sat upright, peering into the hollow. The warriors were grouped at the fire again. The song had died away and the leaders had set up a new, harder chant, tossing phrase and counterphrase back and forth between themselves and the warriors, beating their spear-hafts on the empty cauldron to keep the rhythm. The tone of it was quite different from the birdsong of their earlier music. This was a promise of war and death, not a welcome to the sun. The power of many voices poured into it, raising strength and hope. Breaca felt it rock through her, calling an answer from her heart. Without thinking,
her fingers matched the rhythm, tapping it out on her thigh. “When are they going to fight?” she asked. “And whom?”
“They will fight as soon as the sun is fully up. It will not be long now. When it happens, you will watch and learn. You will not go down.” The grandmother reached back into the fox run in the gorse and drew out a spear-haft, such as the men had used below. “Did you see how the binding was done to fix stone to haft?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Do it now.”
Breaca’s belt pouch was tied with a leather thong of the right length and weight. She unthreaded it and used it to bind back her hair, tying it loosely at the nape as the men had done. It was not perhaps necessary, but she wanted to follow the ritual exactly. The grandmother clapped as the leader of the warriors had done and Breaca knelt with her right knee touching the earth, balancing the spear-haft on her thigh. The position was awkward, but became easier with time. As the men had done, she swept the thong from her hair with one hand and held the stone spear-head next to the haft with the other. The winding of the thong, too, was harder than it had looked. Twice she dropped the stone to the earth. Twice the grandmother picked it up and handed it back without comment. In the hollow, the chanting reached a climax with a wild pounding of feet and stopped, cleanly, on a beat. Breaca finished the final turns of the thong in silence. It was not perfect; she could see how it could be done better, but it was tight and she knew in her heart that the spear would kill for her if she asked it. The haft felt light and vibrant in her hand. In first greeting was the promise of things to come. The sun blazed fully over the eastern rim of the bowl and caught the milk-blue of the stone, turning it gold. A breeze ran over the top of the valley, bringing the smells of smoke and blackthorn and rowan and the wild-bitter war scent of woad. Breaca smiled at the grandmother. The life of the sun and the spear sparked through her. The old scar on her palm, relic of her first kill, began lightly to throb. “Where is the battle?” she asked.