by Manda Scott
Nor did he need light to see the body and soul of the man he had come to visit; a dreamer spends a great deal of his life in half-darkness. Standing on the threshold, he studied the straight, blue-black hair, grown to shoulder length when once it had been cut short to please the legions, the lean lines of the body, once battle-fit and kept almost to that by the work of the forge, the sculpted cheekbones and high brow of a man whom the gods had spun far away from his life’s course, and not yet cast back. There was anger there, and a stubborn pride, and neither of these quite covered the fear, or the effort being made to hide it.
All of this, he compared to what he had last seen of this man, and was not disappointed; three years’ peace and solitude had healed more than mac Calma had thought possible. His doubts, which were many, rested on the condition of the smith’s heart and soul.
He drew a breath and let it out, slowly. Over the pounding clash of the hammer, he said, “You are Bán mac Eburovic, Harehunter and horse-dreamer of the Eceni, and I am growing very tired of your fictions. Your boy tells me—”
“He is not my boy.” The hammer missed a beat and, stammering, found it again. “He calls himself Bellos, after the Bellovaci who were his people among the Belgae. I may have bought him as slave but I have returned to him his name and his freedom. Nevertheless, he hates me. He remains here only because his fear of the Hibernians is greater than his hatred of me. Their menfolk are not gentle in the expressions of their affection towards well-favoured youths with gold hair and eyes the colour of the summer sky. He’s safer here than anywhere else and he knows it, or he’d be gone long since.”
Mac Calma let one brow rise to the top of its flight. “He looks on you as a father.”
The smith shrugged. “A man may despise his father and still be his son. Look at Caradoc.”
“Or at you.”
The hammering ceased. The silence after was hard on the ears.
With exquisite care, the smith laid aside his hammer and, with his tongs, lifted the still-glowing blade on which he had been working. By the blood light of its shine, he spoke quietly and distinctly, as a man might who offers an invocation to his gods in the quiet of a temple.
“Listen to me, mac Calma. I will say this only once. Who sired me is not my business and I will not allow it to be yours. Eburovic of the Eceni raised me and cared for my childhood. Corvus of the Quinta Gallorum taught me to fight and to love and gave me the name that I use. These men I value and respect, but that does not give them ownership of my life or my soul, nor would they claim it. I did not leave the Eceni by choice and did not by choice commit treason against Rome and my emperor. Both have happened and so now I belong neither to the legions nor to the tribes. For the first time in my life, I am free. I intend to stay that way.”
“Are you so?” The dreamer nodded. “And who is it, who is so free?”
“What does a name matter? Here in Hibernia, I am who I make myself to be. I am Valerius to those who favour Rome and wish my aid in improving their Latin. To the rest, I am simply the black-haired smith on the hill who can mend their blades and their brooches and sometimes help their women in childbirth. If you have issue with that, Elder of Mona, take your complaint elsewhere. I have nothing of yours.”
The smith, who had, in his past, been both Valerius, decurion of the Thracian cavalry, and Bán of the Eceni, was shaking when he finished. Three years without wine or ale had not taken from him the tremors of their excess. Blessedly, the unfinished sword he held did not shake with him. Even so, Luain mac Calma watched him too closely for comfort.
The smith was stripped to the waist. The scars of war shone white in the rivers of his sweat. Given sufficient time, a man who cared enough might read a history of the taking of Britannia on the map of his injuries. Two men had cared so and both lived now out of reach of heart as well as mind. If he chose to let them, the memories of either could cripple him. He lowered the blade into the vat of water standing by the anvil and let the steam erase his past.
He was not wholly successful. He might as well have named aloud the two men, and the hurt of their loss, so profoundly did mac Calma’s face change. Through the thickening white, the Elder said, “I’m sorry. I should not have come to disturb your sanctuary. I thought only that you should hear the news.”
Your sister is dead. He would not ask to know more. Even that was too much.
The steam cleared slowly through the smoke hole. By the time the smith could see again, mac Calma had already gone. His voice reached back lazily from the daylight, speaking to the Belgic boy, Bellos, who was no longer a slave but nevertheless held the guest’s horse outside as if it were his duty.
“The red Thessalian mare standing in the paddock was to be my guest-gift. She is elderly and not fit to be ridden but was once of high value. She is in foal to a Pannonian battle horse and if the foal takes on the merits of both sire and dam, it may be of some worth. I have business with the dreamers of Hibernia and it would inconvenience me greatly to have to take her back. Perhaps if you could …?”
Luain mac Calma had trained for three decades with the best minds of Mona; oration was a tutored skill, layered over the gifts of his birth. When he chose, he could raise the inhabitants of an entire great-house cheering to their feet with the first line of a tale, or whisper a sick child to sleep so that it would heal before morning—or touch the soul of a man who thought to make himself invulnerable, and prove to him that he was not.
The smith stepped away from his anvil. “Who have you brought? Where did you find a red Thessalian mare?” He was at the door, in full daylight, forgetting that he preferred the dimness of the forge. The cooling sword hung useless from his hand.
In answer, the dreamer stood back so that his guest-gift could be seen. The mare stood in the small paddock at the side of the hut. She was more than elderly, she was ancient, an elder grandmother among horses, and she had not been well cared for. Her back was swayed from the bearing of too many foals. The weariness of travel and of living hung around her as the first taste of death. Her coat was red, the colour of cut liver, with white scars on her flanks. An old brand showed indistinctly at the base of her neck.
Once, long ago, when the mare was in summer coat and groomed to perfection, the brand had been clear: Leg VIII Aug; a cavalry mare of the VIIIth Augusta, she had been given to a boy of the Eceni who had known of her from a dream.
It had been so very long ago. One might hope that a summer of shared joy with a battle at its end would have left as strong a memory with the mare as it did the boy who rode her, but her eyes lacked hope and met the smith’s without recognition. Hoarsely he said, “She’s too old to be in foal.”
“I think not. It will be her last, but she will do it well. Would you rather she foaled it under the care of another man? I can take her back to Mona if you wish.”
Mac Calma knew all the ways to a man’s heart and did not disdain to use them. The smith did not trust himself to speak, but nodded when Bellos looked at him and then watched as the boy ran to the mare and offered her a lick of salt that he kept in his palm. It was not the first he had given her; Bellos had been a slave once, and knew intimately the hurts of slavery in another, and how to assuage them.
Finding his voice again, the smith said, “Her heart is broken. What is left of it, she has given to the boy.”
Mac Calma did not disagree. “But her foal will give his heart to whomsoever trains him for battle. Airmid believes it will be a colt, black and white with a shield and a spear on its forehead. I have no reason to disbelieve her.”
The smith let his gaze rest on the horizon a while before he trusted himself to speak. “It was a mistake, clearly, to speak aloud the dreams of my childhood. I was young then, and over-trusting. But that dream is long dead and cannot be revived. It died when Amminios made me a slave and took my battle mount into his breeding herds, and if Breaca is dead, then the dream can never be brought alive again; she was the biggest part of it.”
“Did I say that
Breaca was dead?”
They were a sword’s length apart. Valerius, once-officer of the cavalry, still held the half-made blade in his hand, alive with the first stirrings of the weapon it would be. With no clear effort on his part, the tip rose to the level of the other man’s throat. Very quietly, he said, “Don’t play with me, dreamer.”
Mac Calma stood side on to the sun. His shadow, impossibly, took the shape of the heron that was his dream. He shook his head. “I would never play with you. I did not intend any misunderstanding. It is not Breaca who is dead, but Silla, your younger sister, the only one of the royal line to remain in the lands of the Eceni. She died bearing a child for Prasutagos, whom you knew as ’Tago’s, who has named himself king of the entire Eceni nation. He is a supporter of Rome and there is nothing now to check him. If he is not removed, the Eceni—who were your mother’s people, even if you claim they are no longer yours—will become enslaved to Rome in ways we cannot break.”
It is not Breaca who is dead …
Valerius heard the rest and did not care. That single fact wrote itself in his mind, repeating. He held his new sword too tightly. Ridges of half-formed metal gouged into the meat of his fingers. The tidal wave that rocked him was neither relief, nor anger, nor grief, but a mix of these, made ugly and unclean by the manner of the telling.
Late in the chaos, he remembered that Luain mac Calma stood nearby and that there were fictions he still wished to preserve.
He said, “You forget what I have been. If the Eceni lack weapons and the will to fight, it is because I have broken them. Knowing that, do you seriously wish me to weep for the fate of a defeated tribe?” An unknown, unpetitioned god allowed his voice to seem to him normal.
Mac Calma’s smile was unreadable. “Not at all. Your mother was of the royal line and you carry her blood, however unwilling. I had hoped you would agree to come east, to raise the Eceni in war against Rome in your mother’s name so that Breaca might have remained in the west where she is needed and might have led her warriors against an army divided. I understand now that you will not. I have already apologized for disturbing your peace. It will not happen again. I wish you well with the mare and her foaling.”
Luain mac Calma may have been a dreamer but he rode with a warrior’s skill. His horse, galloping, cut crescents in the sodden Hibernian turf that remained long after the grey of his cloak had become one with the mist and the sky.
Valerius watched until a squall of gulls cast high over the coastal hills and broke the horizon. Turning, he found the boy, Bellos, watching him with the same mix of fear and care that he had shown since they first came to Hibernia.
Suddenly, newly, Valerius wanted the boy to feel safe. He said, “Do you like the mare? She was mine once, when I was your age. I rode her in battle and she made my first kill for me. Afterwards, when Amminios captured her, she gave birth to a black and white foal, the Crow-horse; the one you have heard of.”
They had talked a little of their pasts; Bellos knew fragments of Valerius’ own time in slavery, and of Corvus, who had freed him, and a great deal of the Crow-horse, who had made it possible. The horse had come to assume mythic proportions between them. Often—almost always—it was easier for both to talk of beasts than of men.
The boy’s eyes widened. “This mare is the dam of the Crow-horse?”
“Yes. She was everything he is, but that she did not carry his hate in her heart. If I asked it of you, would you care for her?”
It was a gift, and Valerius did what he could to hide any pain in the giving. Bellos knew him better than mac Calma, but was kinder. If anything showed, he did not acknowledge it. Instead, he grinned, brightly, and his gaze lost its wariness and he reached into his belt pouch for more salt and held it up so that she could lip it from his hand.
A thought made him frown, and then smile again. He said, “I will take her, and treat her as she deserves, but the foal is brother to the Crow-horse and must be yours. Promise me you will take him and keep him?”
Valerius had not known that the boy was listening, nor that he could understand Hibernian sufficiently to follow mac Calma’s arcane turn of speech. He did not want the foal, but he wanted the boy to feel safe with him more. He said, “Of course I’ll keep him. The Hibernians are good people, but they would not know how to raise a battle horse if it fell from the sky into their paddocks.”
He ran a hand over the mare and felt her flinch beneath his touch. Thinking aloud, he said, “She’s too thin now to do a foal well, and she has been treated badly. We’ll need hay and corn to feed her and you’ll need to spend time with her daily so that she comes to trust you. That way she will help us when the foal comes.”
They spent the day planning and the afternoon bringing fodder by cart from the village on the coast. Bellos became less shy in that one day than he had in the three years of their companionship. Valerius watched it and cursed himself for needing mac Calma’s false solicitude to show him what to do.
When they retired for the night, he did his best not to sleep, but the blackness caught him, and the dreams within it, which were the old dreams, of loss and destruction and the litany of those he had killed.
He woke early and found Bellos had woken earlier, and had left by his bed, by way of a waking gift, a platter with cheese and an apple saved from the harvest and a beaker of well water, and he was grateful to the un-gods who no longer cared for him that the boy was not there to see him weep.
CHAPTER 3
THE BODY OF THE MESSENGER FLOATED DOWN THE CAVE’S river, buoyed by his tunic and cloak.
Breaca was not a singer; Mona’s laws, which were the laws of gods and ancestors, did not permit her to sing the lay of the dead, but she could speak it, and did so. Only as she reached the part where she should have said aloud the name of the dead man did she realize that she did not know it. The current carried him beyond reach of the firelight and she heard his tunic snag and then tear on the rocks.
His ghost had already crossed the greater river to reach the lands beyond life, following a call that only he could hear. There had been a time when Breaca saw none but the ghosts of her own family and then only in the heart of battle, when the walls between the worlds were thinnest. Now, she saw the spirits of every warrior slain, every legionary, every flux-stripped man. She had not yet seen the ghost of her sister, Silla, which surprised her.
Staring into the fluid blackness of the river, she struggled to find memories of the girl around whose neck she had placed the torc of Eceni leadership.
Thoughts of Bán came first, uncalled, and Silla only after him; the two curled together as children, sharing a bed in the roundhouse and squabbling like hound whelps over their share of the sleeping hides and of the hounds that kept them both warm. There had been less than a year of that, and then Hail had come, the great brindled war hound with the hail-marks scattered across his body and there had been no more squabbling, because Hail had been Bán’s from the moment of his birth and …
It did not do to remember Hail. To remember his life was to remember his death and there was too much pain in that.
Too late, Breaca closed her eyes. The gates, now opened, released a flood tide of memories; of Silla sitting astride an unrideable red roan colt of their father’s with Bán behind her, holding her by the waist as he pushed the mad-hearted beast to a gallop to prove to Silla her own courage; of Bán teaching Silla how to cast a rope to catch a colt, or how to hurl a spear, or simply of Bán on his own, the solemn, earnest child with the surprising smile who had out-dreamed the grandmothers and would one day grow to be a dreamer as powerful as Airmid.
Then, because a child does not remain a child, but grows to adulthood, it was impossible not to remember the desperate broken man who called himself Valerius, whom she had last seen lying on the deck of a ship from Gaul, puking his guts into the sea, begging her to give him a clean and decent death.
Very badly, Breaca did not wish to remember that. It had been better before, when she had believed he
r brother dead, and had sat guarding the dreamers as they had searched the many pathways of the lands beyond life to find his spirit and return it to Briga’s care.
They had failed, of course, because his spirit had not been lost, but afire in the heart and mind of a man who fought for Rome. The discovery that Bán was alive, that he had been the decurion of the Thracian cavalry who had terrorized Eceni villages for ten years after the invasion, had been told only to a very few. Efnís knew, but he would not have spread the word without need. It was possible that Silla had died not knowing the truth, but believing Bán had gone before her. The thought of her now searching for him in the lands of the dead was unbearable.
Nevertheless, it must be borne, with the news of her death and all that flowed from it. With an effort, Breaca banished the past and made herself live again in the present. The wound in her arm burned with a fire of its own that scorched her. She lay prone at the river’s edge and held it under the water until cold numbed the skin.
Her cheek was pressed to the wet stone. The weak light of her fire cast rippling shadows across the water that grew more dense where the body of the messenger had snagged on a rock.
Aloud, she said, “I never asked his name. I have been too long away from human company. I begin to treat men with less care than I would a horse.”
He is cared for well enough. It is you who needs care. You asked my aid once before, will you ask it a second time now?
The ancestor-dreamer was close. Her voice came from the river and the fire smoke above it, teasingly dangerous. It had always been so, from the first moment of their meeting on a night of the dark moon in the heart of a Roman marching camp, when Airmid had called the ancestor to destroy the governor, thinking to save Caradoc. The governor had died, but Caradoc was still in Gaul. The travesty that was Valerius had come back in his place and the ancestor had considered that a fair substitute.