by Manda Scott
“Are you well?”
Her head jerked up. The Roman leaned comfortably against the corner of the forge. She had not spoken to him after the river. Caradoc had taken him away while she was still trying to stand without coughing. The other runners had begun to reach them and it had been thought best for the man’s safety if he did not meet with Dubornos’s supporters in advance of the council. Even without that, she would not have sought him out. Since the shipwreck, she had avoided him when possible and held to the necessary courtesies when not. She had no doubt that the council would condemn him and had not wished to come to like him before the vote. Still, she could not refuse to answer a direct question.
“I am well, thank you, yes. And you?” Her Gaulish was not good. It added to the awkwardness of their exchanges.
“Bruised, but not broken.” He rolled his shoulders reflexively and fingered the old spear wound at his side and she was reminded, as clearly as if he had spoken, that he had not always been an unarmed man, staring his own death in the face. It was not an accidental act.
She pulled a hank of fresh wool from the bag at her side and rubbed it absently up the length of her blade until the woven patterns of her father’s forging rippled blue-grey, like a fish under water. The Roman felt around on the dew-wet grass for a place where the sun had dried it and, finding one, sat down. It put him lower than Breaca. He tilted back against the wall so he could see her more easily. He was not here simply to pass time. She worked the wool over the bronze serpent-spear that formed the pommel of her sword and let him choose his moment to speak. He was, after all, the one who could count his remaining time in days, or less. She remembered the river, and what it had felt like knowing that she was about to die. It had not been unpleasant. It would be good as a warrior to hold to that feeling in battle. If Bán was correct, this man had fought in more battles than he could count and it was possible that he felt like that all the time, which would explain his lack of fear. She looked up to see him better and found his eyes already waiting.
“Your blade is very beautiful,” he said.
“Thank you. I believe so.” She balanced it on her knees. It looked as good as it had ever done. The blade was straight and true, the perfect curves of the pommel gleamed as only good bronze can, and the ancestors’ spear-head embedded at the heart of it shone milk-white. Only the calf’s-hide binding on the hilt showed patches where the lanolin had leached from her fingers. She wrapped the wool round it and rubbed to make them disappear.
The Roman said, “I am told that a blade holds the soul of the warrior for whom it was made. Is that true?”
She frowned, working through the unfamiliar Gaulish. “Not soul.” She shook her head. “It holds our dream. Or the dream of the ancestors, passed down the line, and the deeds of those who have used it.” She used the Eceni word for dream, knowing no other.
“So it is impossible for another to use it?”
“Not impossible, but it must be done correctly—with honour.” She remembered her pledge to Caradoc on the headland and all it had meant and tried to think how to explain the bedrock of a lifetime and the wisdom of the ancestors to one who knew nothing of either. Slowly, testing the words, she said, “If one offers another a blade, in the oath of the warrior, it is in recognition that they are of the same blood, although different; of the same gods, although the names may sound strange; of the same honour, although their paths may never cross.”
“It binds them like brothers—or sisters?”
“Something like.” She thought of Amminios and his reputed hatred of Caradoc. From what she had come to know of the latter, the depth and passion of loathing was mutual. She said, “Closer than that, I think. Sometimes brother will fight against brother.”
“But you would never fight against a man who had lent you his blade, nor he against you?”
“Of course not.”
“I see. That is… a pity.” He was silent and very thoughtful. She finished her work and let the weapon rest between her palms. It was the best sword her father had ever made. Glancing sunlight sparked along the metal, piercing the air between them.
“Caradoc has explained the points to be put before the council,” he said. “There is a balance, for and against. Because of that, if they vote my death, it is possible I may be allowed to fight a chosen warrior.”
She had not considered that. It had merits, not least of which was that the dreamers would not be called upon to kill a man they had come to respect. Airmid, she knew, would be relieved beyond words if it were so. The Roman was still watching her. She said, “Caradoc would be that warrior?”
“He believes so. I suspect he may have to fight Dubornos first for the privilege.” His tone was still tinged with irony but he was not smiling now. This close, she could see that the skin was tense around his eyes, making crow’s feet where before there had been none. Under the sunned brown of his skin, he was pale. A pulse beat at the angle of his throat, faster and harder than her own. She regretted, suddenly, not having spoken with him sooner.
“You would defeat Dubornos,” she said.
“I know.”
“But maybe not Caradoc.”
“He believes not.” One corner of his mouth twitched upward. “I, of course, believe otherwise.”
“Really? Even fighting in a strange land, without your gods and with a weapon you have never held before… Ah—” She stopped. Sudden understanding made her cough. When she could breathe again, she said, “My father’s blade would be too big for you. Even Sinochos’s would be—”
“Far too big. Even two-handed, I could not wield it fast enough. And Dubornos would die before I used a blade of his line.” He pushed himself upright, taking care not to snag Macha’s good tunic on the stone wall of the forge. His lips made a tight, straight line. “I am learning some of what binds a blade to a lineage. They told me yours was newly made. I thought that because of this, and my friendship with your brother, it might be easier for me to borrow it. Forgive me, I had not fully understood.”
He turned away. Breaca put a hand out to stop him. All of her most important decisions were made on the turn of a moment; this one was no different. The rightness of it filled her.
“Why not?” she said. “My father has other blades that he can lend to Caradoc. He has no need of mine, and it will not dishonour our pledge for you to use it against him. Here. Take it; test it. It is a good size for you. See if your blood sings for it as mine does.” She passed the hilt towards him. “Take it,” she said again. “With this blade you could at least meet Caradoc on even terms, and he would not want it otherwise. You should try it now, before the council starts. Wait…” She pressed it into his hands. He was no taller than she was; the blade fitted him well. “I will get another and we can practise.”
“I can’t.” His hand closed once on the hilt and she saw that he did, with certainty, hear the song as she did. The light of it showed in his eyes, in the sudden catch of his breath, in the spark of danger and easy death that passed between them. She could have stepped back and did not.
“No.” He forced his palm open. The blade spun from his hand. She caught it before it hit the ground, her eyes on the man. His breathing was not controlled now, nor his face. He gave a small bow. “Thank you. It is truly magnificent, as you say, but I cannot try it yet. If your council votes for a fight, then I will accept and be grateful. But not before.”
“Why?”
“Because I have hopes that they might still let me go. My gods may be weaker here, but I have put my life in their hands more times than I can number and they have never let me down. I don’t believe they saved me from shipwreck so that I could die now. If I am right, then I may yet return to my unit a free man.”
“Then you will return having known a blade of the Eceni. Is that such a bad thing?”
“It would be a bad thing if Tiberius orders another British campaign. What would we do, you and I, if we found ourselves on opposite sides in battle, and you wielding your blade?�
� His eyes were steady; the panic she had seen was gone, or better controlled. His smile held genuine regret. “I may not follow your gods, but I have no wish to offend them when I rest on their mercy. If I took your blade in good faith now, knowing that this may happen, I would do so.”
It was not at all what she had expected. In shock, she said, “You would go from here, having known us, and yet if your people asked it you would fight against us in another invasion?”
“Yes. Would you do different?”
“Of course. I am Eceni. We do not invade the lands of others.”
She would have left him then but a horn sounded at the great-house, calling the start of council. The guest-laws forbade her to abandon him to walk alone. She offered him a horse and he accepted and they rode in silence up the track between the paddocks to join the gathering council.
The elder grandmother stood in the doorway. A badger-skin robe fell from her shoulders in a wave of black on white, making her seem broader and stronger than she was. The hawk-skin clasping her head was feather-perfect and hid the thinness of her hair. The beaked skull that she held to use as a pointer was chalk-white and drew all eyes. Bán, who had dressed her with especial care, burned with pride. The old woman had grown into her role in the years since her predecessor died and she made a good leader. She turned now to face the quiet mass of elders, speaking the words of invocation to the gods that made the great-house a place of sacred meeting and bound everyone who entered to accept what took place within.
Others stood around, more or less striking according to taste. Dubornos was conspicuous in a tunic of fine Eceni blue and an excess of gold. He had been one of the first to trade for Gunovic’s blue enamelled armbands and he had added a new one each year since. He wore them all now and the metal clashed on his arms. His torc, too, was the product of a southern smith; he did not trust Eburovic to make one of sufficient ostentation. In this, he was probably right. Bán had watched as his father spun out the last of his gold, mixing it with judicious quantities of silver to make a torc for Caradoc that he might come before the elders with the decoration he was due. The result was a thing of breathtaking beauty and strikingly simple. Even without it, Caradoc would have stood out from the crowd. With it, he was regal, and Dubornos was a blue jay, cackling in the branches. Someone should have told him before he shamed his people.
Luain mac Calma stood further back, picked out by his height. His dreaming was the heron; one could see the easy interchange between the tall, long-legged spear-bird and the man. A blue-grey feather the length of his thumb dangled down from his temples, fitted neatly so that the curved tip lay exactly level with the line of his chin. It spun gently in the morning air.
Breaca was near him, blazing in the sheen of the sun. Her hair could have been cast in bronze, her eyes were copper-green and alive with the morning, the white of her shield was snow against the rust of her tunic and hair. Bán smiled at her and she smiled back but her mind was elsewhere. The Roman stood at her side and one could see they had been talking. The tension strummed between them, taut as a drumhead. The foreigner was paler than he had been and he stood too still. He looked grateful as Luain mac Calma pushed his way forward and translated the elder grandmother’s words into Latin. The discordant jumble of vowels and consonants clashed with the soft flow of Eceni around them. Everyone else stopped speaking. In the silence that followed, the Roman bowed. “It is clear,” he said in Gaulish so they could all hear. “I will abide by the rule of the council.”
It was never going to be a quiet meeting, nor a brief one. Had it been called quickly, in the first days after the shipwreck, there might have been fewer with strong opinions to voice. As it was, everyone who was eligible to speak wished to do so. Bán, who was not eligible, found suddenly that he had no stomach to follow the crowd inside. The day was bright and fresh, while the great-house was airless and the smoke from the torches already stung his eyes. It would be more full of people than he had ever seen it. His harness hut had been taken over by Segoventos and the second mate and Bán had been forced to move back into the roundhouse to sleep; he found that he missed the solitude and the company of his hounds. He needed the peace of the forest more than he needed to listen to the old anger of adults, bound up in the language of singers and given credence by the elders. He knew what the arguments were; he had heard them rehearsed too long and too often in the past month.
He looked round, searching for a known face. The crowd flowed and changed around him. Caradoc had taken the Roman into the dark. Airmid was quite close, standing alone. The dreamer had a haggard look as if she had either dreamed badly again or not slept at all. Reaching forward, Bán tapped her on the arm. When she looked round, he signalled himself, then Hail, who lay in the sun at the side of the great-house, and finally the forest. She raised her brows and then nodded. He edged sideways to the rim of the crowd and broke away, running. Several people saw him go but none made any move to stop him. Had he looked, he would have seen that more than one envied him his freedom.
Bán was far into the trees by the time the last of the elders filed in through the doorway and sat in the appointed place. Luain mac Calma, being of Mona, held rank above all of those present and could have led the council had he chosen. He had not. He sat by the door-flap, in a position from which he could be seen and heard and could readily translate if required. He hitched his borrowed cloak to a bracket on the wall and settled back to listen with his ears to the voices of men, with his soul to the voice of the gods and with his mind to the memories of his past, seeking their parallels in the present. It was this last, more than anything, that occupied him.
Luain mac Calma was in his thirteenth year when the last Roman warship ran aground on the eastern coast. There had been no gathering of the elders then. The ship had foundered in Trinovantian waters and Cunobelin, war leader of the Catuvellauni and recently made leader of the Trinovantes, had ignored all requests to place the matter before the elders, choosing instead to put himself in good odour with Rome by returning both men and boats to the Emperor Tiberius intact. More than anything else in his reign to date, that one act had marked the Sun Hound as a friend of the enemy. Word had swarmed across the country like fire through dry grass, spreading west from the dun at which he held court, through the Catuvellauni as far as the Dumnonii in the western toe of the land, before turning right and running up the coast, through the Silures to the Ordovices and across the short, choppy straits to the sacred groves of Mona itself. Luain had been in attendance on the elders when the messenger arrived. He had seen the man given an oak leaf in gold for his services and seen his splay-hoofed gelding exchanged for a mare of far higher quality, in foal by a good horse. Beyond that, he had seen nothing. The elders had called the council with a speed that astonished him and when they emerged two days later, hot and grubby and short on sleep, not one of them felt it necessary to answer questions from a curious youth.
It was the first time mac Calma felt the timing of the gods pull against him. If the general Germanicus had waited one year more to lose his troops to the ocean, the young dreamer would have been a full member of the council and would have heard the laws teased out and examined, heard the balancing arguments made on both sides and understood the final judgement with its train of penalties and actions. As it was, he sat now on the edge of another council led by other people, and found that his heart sent him one way and his head the other, while the laws of the gods twisted both ways, or neither. Which was unfortunate, because they were asking him questions.
“…if we may hear the thoughts of Luain mac Calma, Hibernian, more lately of Mona?”
It was the second time the elder grandmother had spoken his name, and the sound of it brought him back to himself. She made a good leader of the council. For all the shrivelled skin and the lame leg and thinned-out hair, she had a voice that could reach the far edges of the circle and she carried the undoubted authority of age. In the hours since the horn had signalled the opening, she had ridden with great
skill the delicate balance between the factions. She sat in the west, in the place of deepest dreaming. The badger-skin robe flickered patchily white in the darkness and the hawk-skin on her head took on its own life. Even from this far back, one could see the strength of the god in every gesture and if it cost her life-days to do it, there were few present who would notice and still fewer who would say anything afterwards.
“Well?” She was not a dreamer, but she had seen more years than any present and the effect was much the same. Her voice caught a place in his chest and made it vibrate. “You have heard the arguments on both sides. We are evenly matched. You are not of the Eceni, so cannot pass a final judgement, but you come to us from the great council of Mona; you know the laws of gods and men as well as anyone here and you have your own dreaming, which is not inconsiderable. It is known that you have dreamed on this. We can hope that you have an answer. Is it so?”
The tall dreamer rose to his feet. It was late afternoon. He had lifted the door-flap a long time ago to let in the light. The torches guttered, sending threads of black smoke up into the roof space. The scent of it filtered down, mingling with wool and leather and sweating humanity to create the familiar smell of winter and warmth and comfort. He breathed it in and looked round. They were tired now and wanted an answer. The young men wanted blood, even ’Tagos. Surprisingly, he had sided with Dubornos on this. Caradoc had been evenly balanced and had argued better than the others; he had the makings of a good leader if he could be taught to curb his pride. Breaca had surprised him, and the Roman too. The Roman was long gone. He had asked to be excused not long after Breaca’s speech, and his request had been granted. None wished to force him to listen to the words spoken against him. In the time since then, none had offered any new arguments although many had chewed over the ones already made.
Luain mac Calma stepped forward into the space reserved for the speakers. From here, he could see and be seen, hear and be heard. He nodded towards the elder grandmother. “I have dreamed,” he said. “What I have seen will not be welcome and it has bearing far beyond the question before us now. Nevertheless, I believe there may be an answer within it.” He touched a finger to the heron’s feather hanging at his temple and led them into the world of his dream.