by Manda Scott
Bellos’ dreams were not Valerius’ dreams and the man had not explained to the boy the nature of the first true dream of his childhood in which he had ridden a black horse with a shield and spear in white on its forehead in a battle that defined the fate of his sister. Equally, they had not discussed the return of the dream with Luain mac Calma’s gift of the mare and the hopes that arose from it, too deeply hidden for Valerius to name.
Until now, when the foal, so long crushed in the womb, stretched a foot to Valerius’ searching hand and then, as if to prove itself alive, reached its muzzle forward and sucked on his finger.
It had been so long since he had been alone with a foaling mare, he had forgotten what it was to have new life at his fingertips, seeking to set itself on the earth. The foal nudged and nuzzled again and, with that small plea, that promise and prayer of later life, Valerius, who had thought himself immune to love, felt it again, with all the astonishing, annihilating force of the past.
As they had done in his youth, the doors to his heart fell open, so that the cold night became sharper, and the colours of the dark more dense. Weeping, he reached forward again, no longer tired, and Bellos was only a small reason for bringing the foal to safety.
There had never been any chance that the birth would be easy, but he had not imagined it impossible.
Through the darkness and into dawn, Valerius fought as he had only rarely fought before, for life instead of death. He could not have named the point when retreat became inevitable, nor the far later moment when he accepted it and stopped trying to proceed. The mare was spent and lay as if dead, with only the rise and fall of her breathing to show otherwise. The foal had long since stopped nursing at his fingers. He had felt its heart, once, in trying to draw forward a leg, but even that, it seemed, had faded.
Valerius sat back on his heels and tried to think. The mare was black down one side with peat, and lay quite still; to shudder required more effort than she could muster. The foal, if not dead, was close to it. In the recesses of his mind, Valerius heard his mother speak the invocation to Briga that precedes a death and watched as she lay on her side with a blade in one hand of a sharpness that could slice through rawhide, and cut the leg of a dead foal away from its body, and then the head and perhaps another leg, allowing the now-dead beast to be drawn out in small parts and the mare to live.
Valerius had foaled mares on his own for twenty years and had never yet needed to cut up the foal to bring it out. With his mind held carefully blank and his heart closed, he walked the short distance to the forge and back again and the knife that he held was as sharp as his mother’s had ever been.
Later, when the foal had been given in pieces to the crows, he returned with warmed water and some herbs and set about bringing the red mare back to life. Such a thing was not beyond him and the vengeful gods, who could give a man a reason to love and then remove it, did not see fit to include the mare in their retribution.
Near noon, with the mare dried and sitting upright, with oat straw packed along her flanks to hold her square, Valerius returned to the bothy and built up the fire until the room was as warm as it ever was and set about preparing a broth that an unconscious boy could swallow.
At no time did he allow himself to think of the crow-given carcass, which had been a colt, nor of the prophecy, spoken correctly, that it would be black and white with a shield and a spear on its forehead.
Airmid had always been the most careful of dreamers. She had never promised that the foal she so accurately described would be born alive.
The mare thrived on warm mashes and attention through day and night. She came to recognize Valerius, and welcome his ministrations. On the second day after her failed birthing, she rose to her feet and, free of the burden of the foal, walked across the paddock and out through the open gate to the bothy’s door. Bellos still lay unconscious inside, but there was a change to his colour afterwards.
Thereafter, the mare ate the good hay that Valerius bought for her and drank the warmed water with the finger’s dip of honey and infusions of burdock and valerian. Given the freedom of the holding, she spent her time standing at the door to the bothy, blocking the sunlight and upsetting the hens that scratched dust baths on the threshold.
Bellos did not thrive. Three days after the foaling, when the boy showed no more signs of waking than he had done on the first night, Valerius admitted his own limits and walked down to the small coastal settlement that he had very carefully not made his home. There, he found the extent to which the strange, dark smith on the hill, with his strange, blond boy, had become a valued thread in the fabric of life.
Valerius had implied once that the Hibernians were all large and uncouth and that Bellos was not safe in their company. As with all falsehoods, the phantom of truth lay at its heart, but it was not the men or women of the settlement who wished ill on the boy. Any threat, if it existed at all, came from the seafarers who used the sheltered bay and clear springs as a port for clean water and bought meat and ale and were not always reliably sober, or safe.
Those with whom Valerius traded were not all tall and red-headed and none were uncouth. They had not come near his forge, nor offered help without its being asked, but still word had passed amongst them of the mare’s bad foaling and the kick to Bellos’ head. Their only question had been whether the smith had the skills to heal the boy and, if not, how long it might be before he must go for help, and where he might choose to seek it.
Opinion had been divided, but the weight of the betting said that he would go to Mona, to the lean dreamer who had brought the mare, rather than the Hibernian elders who held court around the hill of Tara. There was a deal of satisfaction amongst those who mattered most when the former view was found to be correct.
They were not direct people and Valerius’ conversation drifted, as courtesy demanded, to the welfare of those whom he had helped or healed or armed and clothed, and in the course of this it became apparent that there was a cart he might have that was newly covered with hides to keep the boy dry and that a newly gelded carthorse was fit and good for the journey and that there were hard-rinded goat’s cheeses already packed in the oat straw that would both keep the boy warm and feed the horse, and that a quantity of dried fish and mutton and fresh eggs and pitchers of water had been packed elsewhere, because it had been found early that the smith, contrary to all appearances, drank neither the wine of the Latins nor the more wholesome ale of the tribes.
Last, because they really did value him and wished to see him return, a wiry, dark-haired girl gave him a small pot sealed with wax, with a bee inscribed on the flat surface. Honey was not common on the wild coast of Hibernia and what little was found was kept for healing, being worth rather more than its equivalent weight in gold.
Touched beyond telling, Valerius gave care of his forge to the same wiry, dark-haired girl who had shown some facility for both metalwork and healing. He gave his good riding horse to her father, who had recently re-covered his cart with the hides of three cattle. He gave his supplies of dried leaves, tree barks and roots to the midwife and free use of his bothy to whomsoever amongst them might find need of it.
Mounted on the cart and moving, with Bellos packed in straw as tightly as the eggs and pitchers behind, Valerius promised to return with all speed to those who had become his people. In the moment of speaking, he believed it.
Bellos continued to sleep. Through four days of rutted travel, Valerius came to understand the limits of the amiable bay cob who drew his cart. The red mare, originally tied to the cart’s tail, followed the command of Valerius’ voice and, after a while, proved that she did not need to be tethered. Twice she led the way across spring-full streams when the gelding balked at the torrents. The cart proved sturdier than it looked and the wheels more strongly bound.
Valerius passed through hills heading north, and then at a certain way-stone, remembered from past journeys, turned due east towards the sea. The track here lacked the strong curved surface of a Roman
road, but it was solid and wide enough for two carts. White stones marked the waysides so that, as evening fell and the light waned, it might have been possible to push on through the night to the port.
Valerius had planned to do exactly that, but the scent of salt sea air met the sharper acid of the peat bogs and he remembered, with nauseating certainty, exactly how much he hated ocean travel. Without giving the matter much thought, he turned the bay cob to the side and pushed it out beyond the track to a flat, hard patch of ground where the burned-out embers of others’ fires and a small stack of firewood neatly cut said that the land and its people were hospitable.
The hides covering the cart could, at need, be stretched out beyond the tailgate. Supported on new-cut staves, they offered a measure of shelter from the persistent Hibernian rain. Valerius hobbled and watered the two horses, then lit a fire for the night just beyond the overhang of the hides.
It was far easier than it had been to lift Bellos down from the cart; no broth, however nourishing, can keep weight on a growing youth. Laid out straight on woollen cloaks, with straw padding beneath, he could easily have been newly dead after a long illness.
His hair was no longer the bright white-blond of the Belgae, but lankly dark, so that it hung about his face like wet straw. His limbs were thin sticks with folds of skin and angry bruises at elbows, hips and shoulders where his own weight had pressed on the shrinking flesh and made it bleed. In the last two days, the broth had come through as a thin, rancid scour that leaked from his guts as thinly as urine and scalded any skin left unsalved.
Valerius had never cared for an infant; the dead slave-boy, Iccius, had been his own age when he had nursed him through the insults of beatings and gelding and the use of men. Bellos was older than that, but his incapacity was greater than Iccius’ had been, except at its worst, and it lasted far longer.
Valerius found himself nursemaid, who had never considered fatherhood. Before he ate, or made his own bed for the night, he stripped the boy in stages and washed him clean with water warmed from the fire, then clothed him again with padding built around the sore points and an ointment of goose grease and haws and a flavouring of honey smoothed all down his thighs to keep the diarrhoea from destroying his skin.
All the way through, he talked to the boy as if he were listening, sending his voice out into the night.
“Goose grease because it’s lighter than pork fat, but binds well to the skin. The haws are for suppleness and to keep the lice away. Honey for healing, but then you know that. I saw you give it to Finbar’s ewe when she had a hard lambing. The bay cob went well today. I think they gelded him the night you were kicked and broke him to harness the day after. he’d be better as a riding horse. If your mare was of a strength to pull the cart, I’d let him out and put her in the shafts. Be glad she’s not. She would never forgive either of us for the shame. As you may not, when you come out of this and find out how you’ve been.”
At a certain point, when the cob and the red mare had both shifted in the hobbles, Valerius laid aside the goose grease and lifted his sword. It was not the Roman cavalry blade with which he had fought for nearly fifteen years, nor the long-sword of his ancestors, but something in between, fashioned to fit his own hand and his own weight and used in practice daily, privately, as a man might who keeps an oath which has no meaning save in its own fulfilment. He continued to speak in the language of the Belgae, coarsening it to the south and west, until it sounded more Gaulish and less Germanic. His voice echoed off the damp, resonant hides of the shelter and it was impossible to say exactly whence it came.
“Of course, when we get you to Mona and the healers there know nothing more than goose grease and honey, it may be that you will not recover at all and I will have wasted the best part of a month on a journey with no reason. Luain mac Calma, doubtless, will pretend that he can dream his way to your soul and return it intact. If he is still alive, of course, which he might not be if he continues to—What exactly are you doing here? And don’t turn round; you would lose your nose, which might make the explaining harder.”
This last was in Hibernian, spoken with quiet certainty and far less emotion than his earlier slander of the dreamers.
Luain mac Calma, dressed in plain wool with no marks of rank or of dream, did exactly as he was told. Without moving any part of himself, he said evenly, “I came to find you, to warn you that there are Roman traders in the port and that you might not wish to meet them. One or two are ex-auxiliaries recently come from Gaul, where you are somewhat notorious amongst your erstwhile comrades-in-arms.”
“And you, naturally, just happen to be in the port at the time I might want to have use of a ship?”
Valerius’ blade pressed forward, bridging the small space to mac Calma’s neck, so that it pricked the skin and a thin string of blood seeped into the wool of his tunic.
“I’m a dreamer. I am, in fact, the elder dreamer of Mona. Would you like me to lie and agree that I am here by chance?”
“I would never ask any man to lie.” Valerius did not lift his blade away. “But equally, I prefer not to ask any question more than once. Perhaps I did not make myself clear. What is your concern with my welfare, and that of the boy?”
“Bellos is dying. You were right in your assessment of me. I do, indeed, believe that I can heal him and, no, I will not limit myself to the use of goose grease and honeyed water.”
“Why do you care?”
“Because you do.”
The blade eased forward. The string of blood became a stream. Valerius said, “One more time, dreamer. Your life’s end is a leaning of weight away. Why are you here? What is it about me that you wish to entrap? And if you mention my parentage, you will die. I have killed more men than you have and in far harder circumstances than these.”
“I know. I have watched you do it in the fire.” With slow, deliberate precision, Luain mac Calma, elder dreamer of Mona, turned to his left, so that the sword’s tip scored a circle about his neck. When it reached the edges of the great vessels at his throat, such that to turn further would have cut into them, he stopped. The skin of his face was weathered with hours at sea in strong sun. His eyes took on the yellowed flare of the firelight, as a wildcat’s might.
With no hint of irony, or of fear, he said, “You are Macha’s son. To the best of my knowledge, you have never questioned that side of your lineage, nor should you—to even think it would dishonour your mother’s memory and, in any case, there are plenty of men and women still alive who were present at your birth and can attest to your origins. Until Airmid grew into her strength, Macha was the most powerful dreamer Mona—or Hibernia—had ever known. Had she chosen to stay in either land, she would have been an elder within five years. She chose instead to bear her son and her daughter in the lands of the Eceni, who were her people. Her daughter is dead—and in any case, Silla did not inherit from her mother any of her powers. Her son still lives. His people and hers have need of him.”
“No.”
“No?” Mac Calma allowed his eyes to widen, in anger, or maybe scorn. “You deny the need? Or you turn down the request before you have heard its terms?”
“I don’t need to hear its terms; you asked me once before. I will not come east to lead the spears of the Eceni in my mother’s name.”
“I am not asking you to do that.”
“Then what are you asking?”
“That in exchange for the healing of Bellos—which will have to take place on Mona if it is to happen at all—I have your services, as a son to his father, for the time that it takes for him to recover.”
Luain mac Calma mentioned parentage for the second time and did not die although the possibility remained real for a long and delicate moment.
At the end of it, the blade in Valerius’ hand angled a little back, so that the tip no longer drew blood. Thoughtfully, warily, with a world of things unspoken, he asked, “Who defines the duration of a healing?”
Luain mac Calma did not smile, but th
e effort he made to prevent it was obvious. “I do. But I will not be over-greedy. The day Bellos can stand and lift his own sword and match you two strokes without dropping it, I will agree that he is healed and you are no longer bound to me.”
“And if he dies before that happens?”
“If he dies, then of course you are free.”
CHAPTER 10
WINTER WAS NOT OVERLY HARSH IN THE FIRST YEAR OF the Boudica’s return to the Eceni but snow blocked the trading routes for four months and then the smaller tracks, until the steadings were isolated one from the other and she had seen, as ’Tagos had said she would, why it was that her people lacked the heart for battle.
The elderly had died first, taken in the early months by cold or disease or starvation or a mix of all three. Eight were lost of those who had attended the covert gathering in the clearing; eight who had supported the Boudica’s return and were eight less to aid in the gathering of warriors, and in giving them heart.
For a while, that had seemed important, as if their loss might tip the balance of a strategy yet to be formed. Then the children had begun to perish, which was unheard of in the years before the invasion, and the middle-aged had followed, who should have been strong enough to survive any cold.
It was too close to the ancestor’s vision. Rome had taken in taxes that which might sustain the tribes, leaving the land gaunt, over-hunted and over-grazed. The people were skeletally thin and if the children had wept tears of corn, their parents would have eaten them with gratitude. Each death made more urgent the need to raise an army and throw off the parasite of Rome. Each death lessened the heart of the people and undermined their willingness to fight.
By spring, as the snows began to clear, and the urgency and the impossibility matched each other equally, Breaca set aside the ceaseless circling of her mind and took her son and her hound and her spear and went hunting; it was the best and most concrete thing she could do.