Dreaming the Eagle

by Manda Scott

  When he came, finally, it was with a shipload of yearlings on the back of a summer’s trading in Hibernia and the west coast of Gaul. He rode in through the gates with the dawn on the day of the equinox with Segoventos for company. Breaca had been awake through the night, sitting watch over Airmid, who had been seeking Bán’s soul in the grey lands of the unsettled dead. The attempt had failed, as it had done nightly since the attack, and Airmid had fallen into an exhausted sleep from which it was not safe to wake her. Breaca had called Hail to heel and, without waiting for the hound to join her, had walked down to the river to wash away the dust and disappointment of another night. She met Caradoc outside the men’s house. He was wearing her brooch with red horsehair dangling from the loops and grinning like a child and playing with Hail and looking around for Bán, or for signs of his long-nights. His first words, thrown out in play, were “I thought the Eceni honoured the men returning from their long-nights with greater ceremony than this?”

  He had been trading with strangers for three months and had travelled without pause from the coast; it was not reasonable to expect that he would have heard the news. She knew that, even as she drew her blade and laid the edge of it against his neck, pressing into the skin so that the great vein beneath stood out blue. He stopped smiling before the iron touched him, but did not move. He had sailed for days without break and ridden through the night and was pushed to the edge of exhaustion and he still thought faster than any man she knew. While Segoventos blustered, he raised a hand, his eyes wide and fixed, his mouth set, saying only, “Bán is dead?” And then, when she nodded, not trusting herself to speak, he said, “Amminios. I’m so sorry. I should have known. Tell me what happened.”

  The tale of the battle took far less time to tell than it had to fight. At the end of it, he had borrowed a fresh horse and ridden south, giving no reason but promising to return before the moon was out. He did so, within a time that meant he had ridden without rest. The horse was ruined, but he brought back others and, more important, details of the ceremony Amminios had used when he had sacrificed the dun filly to the Roman gods.

  Of all the blood-gifts from his family, it was the only one of worth. Luain came shortly after to join Airmid and the recovering Macha in the search for Bán’s soul. When it was clear they could do nothing alone, they called in all the dreamers of the Eceni, from the northern coast to the far southern border, and together they spent three nights without break hunting between the worlds to find a boy and his horse. They succeeded in the smaller part; the dun filly was found and guided to rest in Briga’s care, but Bán was beyond them and they stopped their search in the end, fearing to lose dreamers in a place whence they might not return.

  The warriors sat vigil throughout and Caradoc with them, eating nothing and drinking only water for three nights and three days while the dreamers worked. When news came of their failure, Caradoc wept as if Bán had been his own brother, or son. Breaca was beyond weeping. The loss was too great; it burned a wasteland in her soul that no amount of tears would heal. She left the vigil grounds and went hunting with Hail and when she came back she spoke to no-one.

  Airmid took nine days to recover from the search. At the end of that time, Breaca gathered the horses and Hail, ready for the journey to Mona. Caradoc stayed to see them go. On the morning of their leaving, he sought her out alone near the paddocks. It was the first time she felt the aching dread at his presence although she was not clear, then, why it should be so. She would have walked past him if she could, but he stood in the gateway and reached to take the bridle of Airmid’s colt so she had to stop. His eyes were too bright for the morning and his colour high. His hair, bleached to white gold by a summer’s sailing, was darkly damp from the stream and recently cut. The wind twisted it across his face, sticking it to his cheek. He held out a small offering wrapped in deer-skin and said, “This is yours.”

  She met his gaze evenly. It was the most she could do. “There is no need. You brought the only gift you could. What happened was not your fault.”

  “I know. This is not a gift.” He offered it again. “Take it. See what it is.”

  She did as he asked. Courtesy and the guest-laws required it. Inside the wrap lay the serpent-spear brooch with the tokens of red horsehair still hanging free from the lower loops. He had polished it and replaced the pin but it was the same otherwise as when she had given it—an impulse born of a moment that had come to have meaning only afterwards, and had held it, until now.

  He was waiting for her to speak. Baldly, she said, “Don’t you want it?”

  “Of course. What I want is not at issue…” He stopped and began again on a new breath. “If I kept it, would it have meaning, as it once did?”

  Comprehension came on her slowly, with visceral force. Since the battle, she had not known the loss of him, only the pain of Eburovic’s absence and the crippling desolation that came from the theft of Bán. Throughout the long summer, his promise, and her certainty that, whatever had happened, he would keep it, had nurtured a spark of life in her soul when everything else was dead. Now, in his presence, standing close enough to touch, a physical sickness gripped her. It was impossible to be with him alone without the intervention of the dead; he smiled and she saw Bán smile; he tilted his head to the side with his hair stuck to his cheek and it was black hair, not gold, and she wanted to stretch forward and smooth it away as she would have done for Bán; he wept and she saw Bán, grieving for the dun filly; and because she saw Bán in him, she saw also Amminios commit the ultimate act of desecration and take from the battlefield a body not offered to Briga. Even here, with Caradoc so close that she could feel the warmth from his skin, could smell the sheep’s oil on his tunic and the smoke from last night’s fires, he bore a shadow that was not his own.

  The morning grew cold around her, pinching the flesh of her face. When she needed it most, her voice failed.

  “Thank you.” Caradoc nodded as if she had spoken. His brief smile was polite, the product of years at his father’s court. “It is best to be clear.” He let go of the colt and reached instead to touch the hilt of her blade as he had done once before when life was quite different. “The blade-oath—”

  “Is void.” She recoiled from his touch. Her voice, renewed, came too fast and harshly. “The blood-debt makes it so. Even did it not, I would absolve you of it.”

  “Then I would renew it.” One finger remained on her blade and would not let go. His voice matched hers, but was slower.

  “Why?”

  “Because the world contains more people than just us two and someday it may matter that the Eceni are bound to the Ordovices. We do Bán’s memory no honour if we forgo those things that bind us before the gods.” His eyes were level with hers. His face was raw, stripped of the irony and the striking intelligence that were his defences, leaving him open to see and be seen for what he was: a warrior on the cusp of adulthood, struggling to make himself understood in a field that was new to them both. Only once before, fresh from the sea, had she seen him so unguarded, and that had not been within his control as this was now. The exposure unnerved her, and the strength of purpose that drove it. She had experienced his courage in the river-rescue of Dubornos and again facing his father in the forge; she had never thought to face it from the other side. Stricken, she said, “I would never dishonour Bán’s memory.”

  “I know.” His eyes were the colour of stone and as unyielding. “Then will you let the oath be renewed?”

  “Yes.” At the end of a long, stifled impulse to touch him, she folded the deer-skin back over the brooch and pressed it into his palm. “And keep this also. If it comes to mean what it did, I will tell you.”

  “Thank you.” Surprise and pleasure lit his smile. “If the time ever comes, you will know where to find me.”

  She had always known where to find him, or had thought so. He came and went from Mona as the dreamers did, as if the greater part of him resided there. In the spaces between, he was in the land of the Ord
ovices, or sailing with Segoventos, visiting tribes from the Brigantes and Caledonii in the north to the Dumnonii in the far southwest, trading and gathering information and finding who favoured Rome and who did not. Always, the ultimate enemy was Rome; his hatred had never waned.

  On Mona, he had taken a regular place at the warriors’ school and whereas it had been impossible to avoid him completely, she had always been given warning of his coming. They had met sparingly and always with cause and the pattern had been the same each time: a brief exchange of courtesies and small fragments of news but nothing more. The ghosts of their past stood between them and nothing could be as it had been.

  Until now, when he was about to become one of a handful sent on the greatest of warrior’s tests: Caradoc, son of Cunobelin, who had won his spear with three different tribes by the age of twelve; who had never yet failed any test of man or gods; who was bound to Breaca of the Eceni by an oath that prevented each from competing directly against the other.

  Venutios’s voice came distantly and with a different tone from all the names he had called before.

  “Caradoc of the Ordovices is thirtieth of the thirty.”

  “We will hold a feast in honour of Venutios. You will hunt for the table. A boar would be good, or a deer.”

  “Is that all?”

  “It is enough. Venutios will guide you. He remains Warrior until a successor is chosen.”

  Talla had said it, speaking to the thirty in the grey light before dawn. It was the boy-cousin of the Brigantes who had asked the question—a forward youth, unused to Mona’s ways. No-one else had spoken. To hunt was enough, and whatever came after. At Talla’s command, they had run to collect their hunting spears and knives and whatever dreamtokens would bring them closer to the gods. They were forbidden kill-feathers or any other tokens of war. Breaca, with two others, had been permitted to bring a hound.

  Maroc had spoken to them as they gathered again at the gates but he had been no more explicit than the Elder. “You can hunt alone or together; the choice lies with each of you. Only know that you must stay together. Venutios will ensure that you do.”

  They had filed out through the gates in the order in which they had been named. Maroc had made a mark on each as they passed—a thumb-sweep along the brow of woad thinned with water and egg white, naming them for the older gods of the ancestors. The mark was too pale to be seen but Breaca had felt it dry as she ran, tightening so that the pressure was a constant reminder of his words.

  You can hunt alone or together; the choice lies with each of you.

  It paid to listen to Maroc. In two years, she had never known him to speak without reason and his words rarely had only one meaning. There were no boar near the settlement, that was well known. It gave them time to make decisions. Venutios had led them westwards, setting a fast pace, and the others had settled behind, moving into the wide crescent favoured of harehunters, close enough for each to see and be seen, but not so close that they had any cause to speak.

  Breaca was grateful for the chance to run and not to talk. In normal circumstances, she would have hunted alone. She had Hail, who had been taught from the first to hunt in a team of two; the hound was her last living remnant of Bán, and his joy in the hunt made it hard to share him. And yet she was one of thirty and even as they gathered before the gates she had felt the threads of them weaving together: the dark, silent knot that was Ardacos with his soul rooted in the ways of the ancestors; the focused vitality of Gwyddhien, shining like polished jet amongst river pebbles; the sharpness of Braint, the black-haired girl-cousin of the Brigantes, and the obduracy of her redheaded kinsman. Strung out in a line in the heather, they made jewels on a thread, each of them a different colour, each necessary to the whole. Even the dullard of the Dumnonii, who was named in his own tongue for the badger, was revealed, running out in the open, as solidly dependable. Only Caradoc was different, the one not truly of Mona, who, without asking, had put himself on the far left, the place of the shield, the most vulnerable to any attack. He was not part of the weaving, any more than the ghosts who ran in his shadow. She thought that Caradoc, of them all, might choose to hunt alone and waited to see if he did so.

  By any standards, it was not a successful hunt. The thirty quartered the island together through the morning and into the late afternoon and found nothing. None of them, in ten years’ experience, had ever known the land so barren but the very fact of frustration knitted them closer, so that, when the cry finally did go up for quarry, they responded as one.

  They were near an outcrop within sight of the sea, on the westerly tip of the island, when it happened. The curve of the rocks faced east and was backed by a small hill, from the top of which Gwyddhien called down to say she could see Hibernia, that island on the far western edge of the world that was made visible only on days blessed by the gods. Venutios took it as a sign from the gods and called to Breaca and the others to loose the hounds. They were good hounds, all keen and well tested in the hunt, and in defiance of the empty morning each found a different trail, running forward with a single-minded determination that spoke of deer at least, if not boar. Venutios whooped, or possibly Gwyddhien, and the hunt began in earnest.

  The thirty were spread wide and Breaca sprinted down through scrub in Hail’s wake with few others for company. Caradoc ran with her, keeping level with her left shoulder as he had done since morning. His presence marred the sudden exhilaration of the chase, but not so greatly that she could not ignore it; too much was at stake.

  “To the south! Down there in the thorns!”

  Gwyddhien called from the top of the outcrop, pointing down into the trees. It was late in the afternoon and the low sun cast her in silhouette, sharply. Her hair had come free of its bindings and flew wild in the wind, black as a crow, the bird of Briga. In this hunt more than any other, the marks of the gods were omens. Calling Hail, Breaca altered the line of her run and plunged into the broad straggle of wildwood that spread out round the base of the crag. Brambles snagged her skin and beech-brush whipped at her eyes. Caradoc left her. She felt a nakedness at her side where he had been. His loss, her gain, if she made the kill without him. Still running, she ducked under the low branches of an ash and saw Hail ahead of her, stock-still and snarling. Slowing, she crept to him, her spear tight to her shoulder, and looked where he looked, into the depths of the blackthorn.

  Tiny, flesh-folded eyes glared red with loathing. Heat and boar-stench filled the space. A tusk glanced white. A grunt gave warning of certain death.

  Danger consumed her, perfectly. A full-grown boar could kill a bear, ripping it open from gullet to guts. Songs were sung of lone hunters who had faced one with a spear and made the kill unaided, becoming heroes as they did so, but none knew of it happening in truth. Breaca had heard more honestly, from a singer she trusted, of two hunters who had taken one between them, killing it cleanly with the first cast of each spear. She looked about for Gwyddhien and found instead Ardacos, crouched to her right, still as a stone. His spear was clasped straight at his shoulder and the hunting knife in his left hand was smeared with mud, not to shine in the sun. He was naked but for a loin-kilt of fox pelts and his skin was so brown, he could have been part of the shadow. This was how the ancestors hunted, she could feel it.

  She had no idea how long he had been there but it was long enough, and he was the second-best choice for Warrior. She opened a palm, asking direction. He put his finger to his lips for silence and made a curve of his arm, showing where she and Hail should go. She nodded and was gone, Hail at her heel.

  The sounds of others hunting crashed through the woods. The boar grunted a second warning. A stoat chittered—the sign of Ardacos. She loosed Hail at the thicket and stepped in with her spear—and stepped back, shouting, “No! It’s a sow with young. Leave it!” and was in time to stop Hail but not Ardacos, who was fast as his dream and had already made his cast.

  The gods smiled on them. The dark man’s spear struck but did not kill. The sow, enrag
ed, charged in defence of her young. Breaca found she could perform miracles and climbed the blank face of the outcrop, spear in hand, pulling Hail up behind her. She heard Ardacos’s grunt of pain.

  They were hunting in the gods’ wood on the gods’ isle and the gods exacted their penance for a mothering beast injured in defiance of their laws. Breaca’s spear had made no wound and so she was not wounded. Ardacos’s had scored along the sow’s shoulder and he was scored as deeply and in the same place, but he had not killed and so he did not die. He rolled away from the strike as a hedgehog rolls and leaped up to catch the lower limbs of an oak before the beast could turn. An adult male would have circled the tree, waiting three moons if necessary for its quarry to come down, but the sow had young to feed and the scent of hounds fresh in her nostrils and she left him, grumbling, to return to the thorns.

  In time, when the beast showed no sign of returning, Breaca climbed down and found a different path out of the wood, skirting wide of the sow’s den. The after-thrill of danger pulsed through her, powerful as winter ale. Hail ran at her side, desperate to hunt again. Ardacos had found a different path, quicker. She met him at the place where the woods stopped and the outcrop began. He was crouched on the heather peeling moss from a rock to seal over his wound. She held the moss for him and cut a strip from the hem of her tunic to bind it on. He took his time, as if the day were young and the outcome still uncertain.

  “You have lost your spear,” she said. “I could go back and get it.”

  “No. It’s not safe to go back. I can make another.”

  It was the most she had ever heard him speak. He was ten years her senior and as distant as the most taciturn of elders. She had been on Mona twelve months before he had acknowledged her existence and then it was only to push his blade past a weakness in her guard and land a strike on her wrist that would have severed her hand had it been meant. His face was leathered and closed, like a bat’s. She had never seen him smile. He did so now, disarmingly, pointing back towards the southern end of the outcrop.