Dreaming the Hound

by Manda Scott

  He said, “Breaca, we were not all able to run west and become heroes. Every night for fourteen years I have dreamed that Amminios’ man did not strike my arm, or that I moved away, or that I raised my blade to block his and so was left whole to fight with you at the invasion battle. I have dreamed that we defeated Rome together, or that I was with you when you led the children and the warriors of Mona west to continue the fight. In my dream, we stand together and Rome is pushed back into the Ocean to be swallowed for ever and not return. Then I wake, and I am not whole and the legions have not drowned and my people are dying of hunger, of disease, of the punishment inflicted by the legions who will inflict reprisals on us for the damage done them by tribes they cannot reach in the west.”

  She should pity him, and could not. She said, “You are saying that you trade now as a Roman, and that I should not despise you for it.”

  “Yes! In Briga’s name, yes! The children must eat, Breaca. This is the reality and you cannot change it. You think you can ride in and raise your standard and the warriors will gather at your call and, come spring, you can lead them in glorious defeat of Rome. It is not like that, never will be. Live here one winter and you will see why there are no warriors left who could gather to your standard, why all of the people, men and women, are broken: they are too hungry because five-tenths of their corn has been paid in tax and they have lived for days drinking snow-melt so that they might feed the children. Your children will not die this winter because I have taken coin from Seneca and I use it to feed those whose lives depend on my protection. This is my battle and my way to fight it. You will learn it also. If you would teach Graine to lead as befits her blood, this is what you will teach her. There will be no army, Breaca, the Eceni do not have the heart for it. Do you understand that?”

  “No. But I understand that you believe it.” Breaca rose. She looked at each of the three overturned chests. Not a single coin lay in the bottom of any. She became aware, suddenly, that she had not eaten since daybreak and that her stomach had long since turned in on itself, grinding. “What will happen when Seneca calls in his loan and you are unable to repay it?” she asked.

  “I am not unable to repay it. I have made more than there was here in trade and taxes of my own. It’s not all here and it’s in Eceni coin but silver is silver and he won’t argue.” He grinned, thinly. “But if, by chance, I were to become impoverished and be unable to pay, then, naturally, he is entitled to take goods to the full amount; gold, corn, horses, hounds …”

  “Slaves?” Cold curled in her chest. Shall I show you, Breaca of the Eceni, what it is for a people to bleed until there is nothing more to give?

  Misreading her concern, ’Tagos said, “Of course, slaves. But not members of the royal household. They are careful of that. Those whose claim to royalty relies on the thinnest of blood ties and officially sanctioned incest are strangely respecting of those whose claim is genuine and goes back through uncounted generations. Whatever happens, they will not take you or your children. Even Cygfa who is yours in name only is safe. They will take whomsoever else they feel will fetch a price at market.”

  “You would allow this?”

  “I have no power to stop them, Breaca. I am a king because they choose to call me such. If they wish to name another in my place, I cannot stop them.”

  “And if we cease to be royalty, then our family is no longer safe.”

  “Exactly so.”

  It was hard, then, to set aside the vision of a slave pen. Graine’s tears were not of gold, but blood, and they made of her face a battlefield.

  A bed lay along one wall, covered in dyed sheep skins and, underneath, a whole horse hide. Breaca sat on the edge of it and stared at the backs of her hands until she could see them clearly through the image of her daughter.

  ’Tagos smiled, a little sadly. “The Romans don’t want war in the east,” he said. “Your battles in the west have achieved that much. To keep peace, they will not provoke us. To keep our lives, we will not provoke them. It is not something one dreams of, but it is enough.”

  He offered her this as if it were a gift, his accolade for what she had been. The strength of it, or the power of the wine, pushed him past the invisible shield that surrounded her. Coming close, he ran his fingers down the length of her arm. Her control of her body was less than that of her mind. The skin of her forearm rose in goose-flesh behind him.

  He leaned down and kissed her brow. “I do think you should have some wine.” He poured and set the beaker on the floor beside her. She ignored it.

  With his fingers stroking the back of her neck, he said, “You have not asked how your family will sleep.”

  “I don’t have to.”

  The torches were guttering. One by one their oil failed and they sent spider-threads of smoke to the ceiling. Breaca closed her eyes. It was nearly dawn and the spear wound in her arm ached and she was as tired as if she had been fighting all day, and she wanted water, or ale, not wine.

  ’Tagos’ thumb circled over and over on her neck. There was a reasonable chance she was going to be sick, which would be too humiliating. Reality weighed on her after the days of living by the ancestor’s words and he was right, it was not in any way as she had imagined. To ride into battle was far, far easier.

  There were things yet to be said, boundaries to be set so that they might both know them.

  “We have an agreement,” she said, wearily. “We should be clear of the terms. You have stated yours: I will be your wife in all things and will support you in your rule of the Eceni. My terms are equally certain. If my children, or Airmid, or any of those sworn to me is harmed, if either of the women is touched against her will, you will lose me and your hope of rule over the Eceni. Our people may not be prepared to fight, but they are not the sheep you make them out to be and they do not have to accept your rule. The royal line has always been a link between people and the gods. You break that link at your peril.”

  “Obviously.” ’Tagos did not like to be patronized. His hand left her neck. She breathed deeply.

  “Is that all?” he asked.

  “No. One other thing. We will have no children.”

  “What?” His control broke at last. “You have sworn before the elder council—”

  “—to be your wife in all things. I am fully aware of what I have said and what it means. I have not, however, sworn that I was capable of bearing children. I am not, or so Airmid believes. To know the detail, you would have to ask her but I understand that Graine’s birth caused scarring that cannot be mended.”

  He stared at her, only half hearing. He was breathing too fast and the pits of his eyes were wide. “And is that all?”

  “It is.”

  “Good.” With that word, they reached the moment she had accepted as the best possible option in a cave on the side of a mountain. It was neither as good nor as appalling as she had expected.

  He stood in the last light of the torches and she watched him begin to remove his tunic one-handed. He had a lifetime of practice and was as deft as any whole man. The stump of his arm, revealed, was a mess of scar tissue. He stood very still, awaiting comment. He was not lacking courage; his eyes remained on hers in the silence. She had seen worse on a hundred battlefields and said nothing. Nodding, he shed the undertunic and the belt that held it.

  He was so close to what he wanted. He sat on the edge of the bed and his hand moved unbidden to her waist. He kissed her hand and then her arm and then her neck. His voice, muffled by the pulse of her throat, said, “I may not have children, but I have my life and I will keep it. Know now that if I am harmed, if I die, if your dreamers, in fact, do not work their hardest to keep me in health and long life, those of my men who have taken Roman names will see to it that the ones you care for most suffer hardest in the retribution that will fall. Are we clear on that, my wife?”

  He used the Roman, uxor, there being no equivalent in any language of any tribe. Twenty years of waiting sank into the word.

&nb
sp; “Quite clear.”

  “Excellent. In that case, we should celebrate, you and I. If you won’t drink wine, there are other ways to seal a bargain. It has been a long time since Caradoc was taken. You must hunger almost as much as I do.”

  He was naked and required her to be also. He was not such a child and did his best to be attentive. She lay in the lamp-fouled darkness and thought of Caradoc first, then Airmid and Graine, Cygfa and Cunomar and last, inevitably, because she was home, of Bán.

  II

  SPRING AD 58

  CHAPTER 9

  “BELLOS? BELLOS, WAKE UP.”

  The boy lay still, with his white face crushed into black peat and both arms thrown out, embracing the earth. Valerius knelt at his side and struggled to clear his mind of the night’s dream.

  It took longer than it should have done. The dream clung tightly so that, even as he felt the fluttering pulse and lifted the boy’s slack lids, the greater part of Valerius still rode the red mare’s foal in the heart of battle. As Airmid had predicted, the dream-colt was black with a shield and slanting spear in white splashed across its forehead. Grown to adulthood, it carried its rider with all the passion of the Crow-horse, that had been lost to the legions.

  For a man whose life had been given to battle, it was a dream to revel in, bittersweet with the urgency of action and the knife-edge of hope that lingered long after waking. Airmid had always been the most careful of dreamers; if only half of her promise came true and the foal grew to be the barest shadow of the Crow-horse, Valerius believed his life would be the richer for it.

  That hope seemed less certain now. Pulled unwilling from the clamour and noise of dream battles, Valerius had staggered out into the mild night and across the foaling paddock behind the smithy to find another kind of carnage, less readily resolved.

  There, beneath an oak tree, in a mess of wounded turf, the red mare that had been mac Calma’s gift lay stretched flat, shuddering. There was no foal at her side, nor any sign of one emerging, but the honey-salt smell of birth waters was all about, and the mare groaned the deep belly-groan of a mother who has given everything to push out her infant and has failed in the trying.

  All this Valerius understood as he crossed the paddock. Coming closer, he had found Bellos lying near her hind feet and the black stain of peat on the white blond of his hair showed where one hoof had caught him squarely and hard behind the left temple.

  It was dark and Valerius had brought no flame. He had already lifted the boy’s head and pinched his cheek and spoken his name twice before he noticed the dribble of blood coming from his nose and the other, finer, thread at his ear.

  He froze and his mind froze with him.

  “Bellos?”

  Valerius smoothed the hair from the boy’s lifeless face, tucking it in behind his ears in a way he would never have dared do if he were awake. Six years in each other’s company had not broken the barrier of formality that had been raised in the first days of their meeting when Valerius had still lived for the legions and Bellos had been the boy whore bought, not out of pity, or love, or even to use, but in the hope that he might keep one of the more persistent ghosts at bay.

  The understanding that he had won his freedom for who he was not had damaged Bellos’ pride even in their first days together in Gaul as he had clung to Valerius for safety in the face of the legions and the malign power of the ocean. His growth to adulthood, so clear this last winter, had sharpened, not lessened, the hurt.

  For his part, Valerius had never known what to say and so had said nothing. In half a decade, they had not spoken of love, or its lack. Only the red cavalry mare, with her clear care for the boy and none at all for the man, had come to embody the wall between them and opened the wounds again.

  The red cavalry mare, who was dying.

  She stank of fear and defeat and the iron-blood of a battlefield death. Her breath came in great heaving gasps that shook the earth around her, and perhaps the whole land, from one ocean coast to the next, so that all of Hibernia and Mona beyond would know that the horse for whom the Elder, Luain mac Calma, had paid a year’s wages in gold to a duplicarius of the Batavian cavalry, had twisted her womb at the start of birthing, and would be dead by dawn, taking her unborn foal with her.

  It was twenty years since Valerius had last seen a twist. His life had been simpler then, so that the most upsetting moment of his young life was when his mother, Macha, had taken her wedge-pointed lump hammer to the head of a foaling mare, striking between the eyes to free her from life and pain together. Even as the mare had slipped into death, Macha had sliced open the heaving belly and released her foal, dragging it into daylight, sluggish but living, to feed and thrive on another mare. The filly born that day had grown to be dam to the Boudica’s grey battle mare, and the boy who grew to be Valerius had come to accept that his mother had been right.

  The adult Valerius had used his own hammer on horses and on men, releasing each from life that had become intolerable. There would be no effort in doing so again now and, knowing the mare, he did not believe her soul would wait for him as others did in the lands of the dead, seeking vengeance for a life cut short without cause.

  Bellos, though, would certainly do so. His care for the mare had grown through the dark months of winter, the quiet romance of two strangers marooned without their consent on a foreign land. He had some facility for healing; given time and tuition, he might grow to that as a profession. In all probability, he had believed his friend would recognize him and would still her struggles as he lay in the peat behind her, striving to draw out her foal. For a boy raised in a brothel, he had a long way to go in learning the nature of pain and of love and how the first can override the second.

  Valerius moved his hand down and checked again the erratic patter of life at Bellos’ throat. In the clouded mess of his thinking, another fact became clear to him.

  “If I kill her now, what will you live for, child? Would you return to life only for me? I don’t think so.”

  The understanding of that hurt more than he had imagined. Smoothing the same errant strand of hair, Valerius said, “Bellos, if you’re listening, I’ll do what I can to keep your mare alive. If she dies, it will not be for want of trying.”

  With the decision made, Valerius worked efficiently. If he were to attempt the impossible, Bellos had to be made safe first. The boy weighed more than it seemed from the slightness of his build, but it was easy enough to carry him into the single room of the smith’s bothy and lay him in bed with warmed stones around, wrapped in wool. He could not drink of his own will, but could be made to swallow mashed infusions of comfrey and plantain, boiled and cooled and kept in a stone jug for women too spent to eat after childbirth.

  The mare had not moved when Valerius returned; she lay shuddering as she had since he first found her. Bellos could not hear him with waking ears, but there was no harm in talking to him as if he might listen from some other place. Conscious of a presence looking over his shoulder, Valerius said, “Watch now, and learn. We may save both of them yet.”

  It was not easy work. He should have had two others to help, to turn the mare one way as he turned the womb the other. He considered walking down to the steading to wake one of the quiet, stolid women who knew as much of birthing as he had ever done. For Bellos, he would have sacrificed his pride, but the walk down and the waking and the walk back would have taken until morning and he did not believe the mare would live to see the dawn. Alone, then, Valerius fought and sweated and cursed and it was no different from being in battle, except that the mare was not actively trying to kill him, but only groaning in her turn, and straining to give birth to a foal which had no clear passage to freedom.

  “Please … turn with me now … just … turn.”

  The mare heaved and kicked, striking backwards with both feet. The crush of her haunches drove Valerius’ face into the sodden peat. His arm burned and chilled and burned again and an old wound at his shoulder screamed fresh pain. He braced hi
s elbows against the earth and pushed with outstretched fingers and, finally, magically, the foal hovered on the brink of turning, then fell sluggishly over, opening the neck of the womb.

  “Thank you … thank you. Wait now, it’s not over yet. Let me think. Just give me time to think.”

  He lay flat on the peat, heaving in air as the mare had done. He was weeping for no better reason than relief and an end to exertion. He wanted Bellos to know what he had achieved and what was yet to be done but could find no way to tell him. The boy had not returned miraculously to life, but equally, when Valerius ran up to the bothy to check, he had not yet left it.

  Returning, Valerius lay down once again. He patted the mare gently on the rump and spoke as he would have done to a birthing woman, with only the barest of lies. “That’s the worst of it over. Let me feel how the foal’s set and we’ll bring him out and you can rest.”

  The foal: the white on black phantom that had stormed into his dreams one day in autumn and had come to inhabit them to the exclusion of everything else. Luain mac Calma, elder dreamer of Mona, had sown the seed with casual ease and it was hard not to believe the act deliberate. Airmid believes it will be a colt, black and white with a shield and a spear on its forehead.

  Valerius had denied him, saying, That dream is long dead. At the time, he had believed it. The truth had become apparent only later that night, and then other nights and then all nights and into the days so that he had to fight to keep his mind clear for the forging or the healing or the leatherwork or the simple making of meals for himself and a Belgic ex-slave-boy who had fallen in love with an aged cavalry mare and did not give more than a passing thought to the foal that she carried.