by Manda Scott
At dusk on the same day, a thinner, darker column, drifting to the south, showed on the easterly horizon.
Airmid said, “We are expected. Efnís will do what he can.”
Two nights later, guided by smoke, instinct and uncertain dreams, they rode along the bank of a river and followed a track that turned east of north into dense, unmanaged forest. Neither Eceni nor the legions had been here, except perhaps on certain trails which were wider than might be made by deer or bear.
The night was clear and the sky unclouded. The pattern of stars that made the Hare had crested the horizon when they heard the voice of a single man singing the lay of lost souls with a pain that made the loss sound new and raw. Ahead was firelight and a ring of silent, seated figures. Their presence filtered through the trees, like so many hunting hounds, lying in wait.
Because Airmid had brought them this far, it was possible for Breaca to believe that those waiting were not Romans, armed and ready, but the sense of danger was no less. Through his messenger, Efnís had said that the Eceni were weak and that, lacking a leader, they no longer had the will to resist the many terrors of occupation. He had predicted betrayal and death for the Boudica and all who rode with her, should she ever come east. Only the ancestors, already safely dead, had suggested otherwise, and offered a way forward. They had not said what might happen if their path were not open.
Breaca slid from her horse and found Stone waiting. He leaned into her side, shoving his nose in her hand, as he did at those times when danger pressed most closely. She cupped his muzzle in her palm and thumbed his lips, asking for patience and silence. Around her, the others dismounted, except Graine, who sat alone on the roan mare, waiting to be lifted down.
They were her friends, her companions. Two had been her lovers and might be so again. In pride, driven by the visions of ghosts, she had led them this far into danger. Every war-honed instinct said that there was still time to turn round and lead them back.
Dubornos was closest to her. He had stood in the shadow of his own crucifix in Rome. Five years had not healed the scars of his imprisonment.
She said, “Dubornos—”
“No.” He smiled. She could not see him, there was not enough light for that, but she could hear the lift of it in his voice. A smile from Dubornos was a rare thing indeed. He reached out in the dark and touched her arm.
“Don’t think it. We are here because we choose to be and because the gods will it. You are the guide, nothing more.” His other hand lifted towards her. “We brought you this. There are those gathered here who will not want to accept you. It may help sway them.”
Breaca’s fingers fumbled for his and met warm metal. Feeling further, she found that what he offered was a torc: not the relic of her lineage that marked the royal line of her people, but a newer one, made by her father as a gift to Caradoc in the winter of his shipwreck. For five years, it had lain near her bed in the roundhouse on Mona. She had never taken it with her on the lone hunts in the occupied lands.
It was simpler than that made by the ancestors but the lines were fluidly perfect and he had mixed other metals with a good red gold so that, in torchlight, it matched exactly the colour of Breaca’s hair. She knew the feel of it intimately and held it now, warm with the heat of Dubornos’ body.
The gaunt singer was close enough now for Breaca to see the whites of his eyes. In all their adult lives, he had never lied to her. She knew of no man with more integrity. He smiled for a second time and she could have wept for the pain in it, and the promise.
Even so, there was still time to turn back.
“Efnís sings for you.” Ardacos spoke from behind her. He was not of Nemain, nor did he dream. With Gwyddhien dead, he could have been Warrior of Mona and led all the warriors of the west, adding his mark to those carved on the roof beams of the great-house, not living as nursemaid to the Boudica’s children in a land under thrall to Rome.
As Dubornos had done, he reached for her. The feather he gave her was silver, wrought from unsullied metal. Gunovic had made it, in the year before he died. It marked fifty kills, or five hundred, Breaca had forgotten which and it had never mattered; only children and the newly made warriors counted the crow’s feathers that marked their kills. Yet the Eceni, starved of war and its honour, might need such things.
Ardacos said, “Weave this into your hair and go. They know nothing, only that Efnís has promised them a future. You are all he has to offer.” He gripped her arm above the elbow and clasped her, as close as he came now to an embrace. His touch alone warmed her.
Even so, there was still time.
Ardacos had been her lover once, replacing Airmid, for whom there could be no replacement. Airmid was there now, as she had always been, as she must always be, or life would be unsupportable. She was speaking, saying the same as the others, differently. “Breaca, don’t think of turning back. We have seen what Rome has done to the land we grew up in. We can only imagine what has been done to the people. There is not one of us could live with any honour if we turn back now.”
Even so.
“Mother?” Graine was still mounted on the roan mare. If they hanged her, she would take half a day to die. “We can’t go back now. It’s snowing harder than it was. The Roman patrols will see our tracks as soon as it’s light.”
She was a child and had never tracked another, nor been tracked, but she had grown on Mona, listening to the best hunters the west had ever seen, and she knew the realities of danger in winter as well as any adult. She spoke the plain truth and changed the nature of the choices.
So.
In the clearing, the singing grew softer. In other worlds and other times, a girl-child with ox-blood hair wept tears of gold while, on a battlefield, the serpent-spear presided over Rome’s destruction.
Breaca reached up and lifted her daughter, child of her soul, from the saddle. The five who made the other parts of her heart watched her from the darkness.
With too much formality, because she could not, at that moment, speak otherwise, Breaca said, “If the dreamers and singers of Mona will join the song to Briga, the children of the royal blood will come to meet their people.”
The deer track led forward into a clearing. Torches made an outer ring, giving off white pine smoke. Above and around hung the unshed autumn leaves of oak and elm; a thousand fillets of bronze caught the torchlight and reflected it back, warmer.
The leaves outnumbered many times those who waited within the trees. Standing with her mother, beyond the wheel of light, Graine could more easily count those within it. They were less than a tenth of the number who had filled the great-house on Mona when the war host of the west had last gathered and a great many of them were old. White hair predominated and the coughing of the winter-touched elderly wheezed over the singer’s lay.
Efnís stood in the shadows beyond the circle, still singing. His voice spanned them, a wreath of woven sound. Airmid and Dubornos cut through the trees to join him. Beginning quietly, their voices joined his, rising to Nemain with the resinous smoke. As three, the interweaving melody came closer to what it might have been sung by many throats. Gaining power, it grew to a climax and stopped, suddenly. The silence after was a space that asked to be filled.
It was too late, then, to realize how poorly prepared they were for such a moment. Graine panicked, uselessly, as she felt her mother leave her side. On Mona, addressing the warriors and dreamers of the great-house, the Boudica would have worn a cloak and tunic that had hung since their making over a smouldering fire and knew neither damp nor mould nor insects. In the half-day before, she would have woven the nine-layered warrior’s braids into her hair with the gold-banded kill-feathers to honour the ancestors. Her blade would have hung at her belt and her knife would have balanced it and the serpent-spear would have come alive on the hilts of both.
Here, she was at the end of a half-month spent travelling with twice that long hunting alone in the mountains beforehand. Her cloak was creased and stained from t
ravel. Her tunic was edged in drying mud and her boots were sodden with snow-melt. She lacked her blade and her sling hung in its place at her belt. Her knife-handle was of plain wood with no adornment. Her hair bore a single braid and the silver crow’s feather was dulled where Ardacos had polished it with the tail of his cloak.
This was the reality; it was not what was seen.
Breaca stepped into the light of the resin torches and a drawn breath sighed around the fullness of the clearing as the gathered warriors, dreamers and elders of the Eceni nation saw their greatest hope, and their deepest fear, made real for the first time in twenty years.
For them, the Boudica was a thing of flame and burnished metals. The red-gold torc was a living serpent about her neck. Her hair was the deep, fired bronze of a fox in winter. Her eyes were copper-green, alight with battles fought and won.
She could have stood like that, Graine thought, for ever. The Eceni elders hovered on the cusp of change, lodged at that meeting of many ways where all paths forward are possible but only one can be taken. Each of them, from oldest to youngest, felt it.
Efnís broke the spell. A single step forward brought him out of the shadows. Like Breaca, he had done what he could to dress for the occasion although his cloak was noticeably faded and the rolled bark of his dreamer’s thong was fresh, still damp from the tree. Rome forbade the wearing of the dreamer’s thong, as it did the warrior’s blade; simply to have made one was to risk the death.
Graine had met Efnís once before on Mona and had liked him. She wanted to ask who had died that had made him sing the lay of lost souls and could not because he was already speaking.
“Breaca, greetings. The high council of the Eceni bids you welcome.”
He gave the salute, neatly. Airmid and Dubornos, coming forward to join him, did the same. It may not have been arranged beforehand, but it had the desired effect. Hesitantly, others around the circle followed. One arm rose after another, stems of winter grass rising in a sluggard breeze, until all three hundred were standing, these old men and women who had survived the purges, the hangings, the betrayals by kin and paid spies, who had gathered the shreds of their courage to meet in secret knowing that their death could be measured in days if they were found.
It was the right thing to do, done with the wrong feeling. Graine shivered and wished the grandmothers would come and tell her what to do to make it right. As if she had spoken aloud, Breaca turned and smiled at her directly, not the private half-smile of the clearing, but a public affirmation. Kneeling, she crooked her finger, calling her daughter into the circle—
—which was madness. Graine, too, had been travelling for half a month and it showed. She was not the Boudica to command the wildfire in the company of strangers. She had neither torc nor silver feather to weave in her hair. The brooch at her shoulder was a plain one in the shape of the wren, which had been Macha’s but had been worn so long that the shape of it was unclear. Her hair was not combed and she had never worn a dreamer’s brow band. None of this had mattered while she was anonymous in the shadows. It mattered a great deal in the lifetime it took for her to walk from the safe anonymity of the forest into the circle of her mother’s arms under the stare of three hundred falsely saluting elders.
The grandmothers may not have spoken, but her mother, it seemed, had miraculously divined what to do. It is difficult to stand on one’s dignity in the presence of a child and unmannerly to do so in front of a mother who kneels and ruffles her daughter’s hair. As the grass had risen under the breeze, so did the breeze, uncertainly, lay it flat. In ones and twos and greater numbers the elders of the Eceni ceased to salute and sat down again.
Breaca kissed Graine on the brow and, taking her hand, walked to the folded horse hides that formed a seat at the western edge of the circle. Picking one up by the corner, she dragged the pile forward, not quite to the centre, but almost.
To her daughter, with a mother’s intimate humour, she said, “Can you sit on the hides like an elder, do you think?”
Of course. For her mother at that moment, Graine could have flown to the heights of the sky and sung like a wren. As she had practised with Airmid many times in the small stone hut on Mona, she spread her arms a little so that her cloak fell straight back between her shoulders and, folding her legs beneath her, sat neatly on the hides.
Praying to Airmid more than to Nemain, Graine of the Eceni raised her head to face squarely a gathering of her people’s dreamers. Three hundred old men and women looked back. At least half of them were weeping. Breaca stood behind Graine, a hand on each of her daughter’s shoulders. When she spoke, it seemed she addressed every one alone.
“This is the first and only daughter of my blood, Grainenic Breaca mac Caradoc. If you are ever to stand and salute, it should be to her. She is the future, the one for whom we have fought these past fourteen years in the west and for whom we will fight now in the east. She was born into war as we were not. We have done what we can to raise her true to her birthright, living daily in the sight of the gods, knowing also that your children have not had that luxury. We come now to join you, to raise her in the land that is her own and to ensure that for her children and yours, that birthright is no longer a luxury. It is for this reason that, with your help, we will fight and defeat Rome.”
The Boudica, speaking thus to the warriors of the west, would not have needed to seek pledges of courage and honour from her listeners. They would have been standing by now, clamouring to be first to give their spear-oaths in the old way, throwing their lives, their souls, their freedom to her cause.
On Mona, there was courage enough and more to spare. Here, manifestly, there was not.
Knowing it, Breaca did not leave a space which might not have been filled. Instead, she signalled behind her, calling forward Cunomar and then Cygfa until they sat in a row before her, a woman and her three children; the Boudica, bringer of victory, and every part of the royal line of the Eceni.
Silence greeted them, and no salutes.
Graine leaned back against her mother, feeling less certain than she had done. In two years, since their return from Gaul, her brother and sister had never sat next to her like this, claiming to be family. Sorcha’s children had been her family, and Airmid. She glanced sideways into the night beyond the torches. Stone was there, held by Ardacos. She mouthed a request and had it answered and the great hound stalked forward to her side and she felt whole again.
Breaca stood, facing the gathering. In the lack of words was the heart of her message. I have brought my family amongst you. I take the same risks that you have taken. You can trust me.
They were not witless, these old men and women, and they took pride in what was left of their dignity. A sigh rustled through them, barely shifting the air. Graine saw them look away from her mother and turn their attention on one of their own number.
Inevitably, they had already chosen a speaker. She rose, a grey-haired stick of a woman, tall and ascetic, starved by the impositions of life or her own will so that her skin clung to her bones and the joints on her fingers stood out like windgalls on a horse. Her cloak was Mona’s grey, ragged from the attentions of rodents and rot. She carried a raven skull in her right hand with the white beak pointing forward as a sixth finger and a single black wing hung at her breast. Of everything she wore, the skull and the wing were the only things that looked truly clean.
“You are well fed, Breaca of the Eceni, and your beautiful children with you.”
She did not smile, but nor did the words sound to Graine as harsh as they might have seemed. Her voice was smoother than a raven’s. “If you had come sooner, when we still had warriors with the will to fight, or were able openly to carry our spears and blades and had not been driven to hiding them beyond reach in places of which even our families know nothing; if you had come with the ten thousand spears of Mona riding behind you to uphold your claim, or sufficient dreamers to breathe heart into the broken-hearted, we would have welcomed you gladly.”
&n
bsp; She looked around her peers. Nobody rose to stem the flow of her rhetoric, nor turn aside its obvious course. Tilting her head as a raven does, listening, she continued, “But you did not come earlier and although you have brought your family, and although we have heard of the deeds of the daughter of Caradoc as she fights alongside the Boudica, it is too little and too late. We are broken and we are not so easily mended.”
The raven beak rose on an outstretched arm and opened wide so that the sound of her voice came from the gaping space between them. It was no longer smooth. Whoever had taught her on Mona could be proud of their pupil.
“Go home, Breaca, once-ruler of the Eceni. We have another ruler now and his power comes from an emperor in Rome who would make of himself a god. There is no place for you here. You will do better to stay in the west and fight. We will honour you and your family. Your dreamer can teach your children the ways of the dreaming to carry down the generations. Ours are lost and there is no redemption.”
The breath caught in Graine’s throat and she felt Cunomar shift beside her and then make himself be still. From their earliest childhood they had known that the safeguarding of the children had been the core of their mother’s dream. Such a thing is private, not something to be spoken aloud by a stranger in the company of strangers.
If Breaca was shaken, she did not show it. She said, “And yet you have all come to a gathering within reach of the legions, who might have remained by your house fires in safety.”
The woman lowered the skull pointer. Her voice was no longer the raven’s. “Whatever has befallen us, you are still of our royal line and we are not totally lacking in courage. We do not wish to show you dishonour, but instead to show you who we are, that you may go back whence you came and fight on. We are the example of how it will be under Roman rule. We may be lost but the west need not be, and while Mona stands, there is still hope.”