by Manda Scott
The weave of the morning changed, became too raw, too serious where before had been geniality and simple friendship. In Cunomar’s world of black and white certainties, too many things were newly uncertain. He stared at his hands and the hawk and back again, not at Eneit. An image of a broken spear-blade fixed in his mind and Eneit’s voice telling him that his heart would break if the weapon were not mended. He wanted to say that his mother could mend anything but the words would not come.
Presently, when the press of the silence grew too great and he needed to hear the sound of his own voice, he asked, “Why are we going to the mound of the ancestors if not to help find your dream?”
Eneit breathed out slowly and audibly through his nose. After a space, he said, “To find yours, of course. Or, at the least, to find Sinochos’ sword for you so that when the dreamers name your time and you spend three nights alone and come back to take your spear-trials, your mother has a blade to give you when you pass them.”
His voice lost its harshness and discovered instead the god-moved lilt that he got from his mother, the dreamer. More gently, he said, “You forget, I haven’t lived on Mona. I’ve never seen someone come home with the rising sun at their backs and the new dream alive in their eyes. I have never seen a warrior school, or stood on the heights above a battle and witnessed acts of heroism that will last in the songs a thousand years. I live in a different world and the things I want are different. We all dream. You and I just have to know that where our dreams take us is not the same. Come on …” He pushed himself upright and kicked Cunomar accurately on the sole of one foot. “Get up. You owe me a sword belt. The mound’s in the next dip. If you’re fit to walk, we’ll find you a blade with a history to be proud of and see if it pushes the dreamers into naming a date for your long-nights.”
The ancestors’ grave was half the size of the one in which the Boudica and her warriors had hidden their weapons. It was roundly flat, half submerged in the sand, and grass had gained hold in the cracks between the rocks so that even from close by, it was hard to pick it out from the surrounding turf. The entrance was a once-square hole low down one side, rounded at the corners and rubbed almost circular by weather and the passage of many people.
There was no question now of simply looking and leaving. Eneit led the way and Cunomar followed. The opening did not lead directly to a passage as the one in the other mound had done, but rather opened over emptiness so that anyone seeking entrance had to lower himself down and then, trusting, let go and fall the last distance to the ground below.
The drop was not as far as Cunomar had feared it might be, less than a spear’s length from his dangling legs to the floor. He landed unsteadily on stone in the half-dark and the cold, in a place where shadows made the space seem larger and the draught of their landing raised for a while the old dust of the ancient dead.
The dead here were no more welcoming than they had been before. Cunomar felt the ghosts’ impatience as a fluttering in his abdomen. Belatedly, he remembered Eneit’s fear. Lanis’ son stood directly under the gap in the roof, wide-eyed and with an unsteady tilt to his smile.
“Have you been here before?” Cunomar asked.
“No.” Eneit moved a step away from the light, waving an arm out in front of himself to feel for the walls. “Until you came there was no reason to look for a blade. I wouldn’t have known how to pick it up, never mind use it.” He took another two steps and stopped, barely visible in the dark. “There’s a wall here.” Then, after a pause, “And the roof comes down low.”
“If there is a blade, it will be hidden off the floor, in cracks where the stone makes a lip, so anyone bringing in torches won’t see it.”
Cunomar spoke into silence. He could have been alone. After a while, Eneit, strained, said, “How do you know that?”
“My mother and the warriors hid their blades in a mound like this. I went with them, to watch.”
“Did you feel as if they hated you?”
“Yes. But they loved my sister.”
Cunomar found himself wishing for Graine’s company. She was at home in the grey places between the worlds in ways he himself was not. His outstretched fingers brushed against stone.
“There’s a wall here too. You go right, I’ll go left, we’ll meet in the middle and cross over, that way we’ll have each felt all of the wall. Feel in front of you at shoulder height for cracks that stretch sideways and are long enough to take a blade.”
Following his own advice, he stepped sideways, slowly, sweeping his fingertips across the stone in front of him. The clamour in his abdomen became a grinding ache. The skin of his neck and arms prickled. Greasy sweat gathered along his brow and slid down to his cheeks. He took a third step and felt something substantial flutter past.
A wounded man groaned the name of Briga. Cunomar said, “Your mother should come here. The shades of the battle-dead have not all left for the other world. Lanis is of Briga. She has the raven as her mark. She could help them find their way across the river.” His voice bounced off the walls and came back to him, hoarsely rasping.
Eneit’s sounded no better. “She comes here often. She came before the gathering when she spoke against your mother, and came out knowing how to speak so that the gathering would vote for the Boudica to stay.”
“She has a courage beyond any warrior’s.”
“I know. All the dreamers do. Has it really taken you this long to discover that?”
They spoke to keep the silence at bay, all the while shuffling sideways, feeling the walls. Space and time stretched, immeasurably. From the far side of the blackness came a bump and a brief, bitten curse, called back at once.
Thickly, Eneit said, “Cunomar, I think we should leave.” He sounded close to weeping, which was unheard of. Even in the face of his mother’s temper, Eneit never wept.
Cunomar said, “Stay where you are. I’ll come round to you.”
He stopped looking for the cracks in the stones and concentrated simply on stepping sideways, one pace at a time. In the beginning, he swept his hand ahead of him, but a second flittering shadow brushing his fingertips made him draw his arm back and hold it tight to his side. The space of the mound was less than the span of Airmid’s hut on Mona and had seen, he thought, fewer dangers. He had heard the story of Lythas, the traitor of the Brigantes who had tried to lure the Boudica to Cartimandua’s encampment, and of what had been done to him by the dreamers. The horror had been exaggerated, certainly, but Cunomar had never felt the same about Airmid’s stone hut after he had heard it.
In this smaller, older, less congenial place, each step forward required the whole of his will and each brought him closer to the brink of panic. Through all Ardacos’ lessons of stalking, even on the journey east when they had been within a stone’s throw of the legionaries, his heart had never raced as fast as it did now, nor beat as hard. His body shook with the hammering in his chest and sweat washed his face, running in tracks to his shoulders. He felt as if he were walking through water along the bottom of a lake and that great fish swam near, hunting him, or that he squirmed on his belly in fog and darkness and snakes swarmed over his naked skin. He felt thumbs press on the globes of his eyes, crushing them, and beasts with the hands of men and the jaws of bears cracked his long bones and ate the marrow and his feet were rooted to the floor preventing any escape.
“Cunomar?” A toneless whisper.
“Yes?”
“Where are you?”
“Here.”
“You’re going the wrong way.”
“No. I’m coming left.”
“Then you’ve stopped. You should have reached me by now. It’s not a big place.”
Darkness swallowed him. The fish and the snakes and the bears sucked at his soul. In blind panic Cunomar stared into the dark and, for the first time in his life, prayed to Nemain for help and deliverance. Unexpectedly, astoundingly, magnificently, Graine gazed back at him from the echoing blackness. Her wide, solemn eyes scanned his face, seeking a
n explanation, and found it. Smiling her shy smile, she said, Get away from the wall. Seek the light. You are of Belin, who is the sun. He will care for you.
Cunomar took half a step back. Light drew him like a beacon. Reluctantly, the horrors loosed their hold. “Eneit—”
“What?”
“Step back. Don’t touch the wall. Come back to me and the light.”
They met in the centre, speechless. Eneit’s skin was a sickly grey and his breathing ragged, as if he had run too far, too fast. Cunomar looked at his own hand and saw it shake worse than Claudius’ had done, who had palsy and could never control it. He looked up at the gap in the ceiling a spear’s length over his head and knew that if he panicked now, he would never get out. Bracing his feet wide, he looped his fingers together.
“Step on my hands as if you were mounting a horse,” he said. “You’ll be able to reach the edges of the rock and pull yourself up.”
“What will you do?”
“I’m taller. I’ll jump.”
He had tried to make his voice sound as his mother’s did before battle. If he did not exactly succeed, still Eneit did as he was asked without stopping to question it. The older youth’s feet slithered up through the hole into the light. After the briefest pause, his head reappeared at the gap. “I’m safe. Are you sure you can jump that far?”
“No, but I can try. If I fail, you can go back home and get a rope.”
“And leave you alone in there? Do you want to go mad or are you already there?”
“Neither. That’s why I’m not going to fail.” Cunomar heard the shadow of his father in his own voice and the small part of him that was not terrified knew a brief moment of ecstasy.
With a prayer to Belin as his sister had ordered him, Cunomar, son of two warriors, jumped and felt his fingers grip on rounded rock and Eneit’s fingers close on his wrist. The wriggle to the surface cost him skin on his shins and thighs but he had never before been so glad to see the light.
Afterwards, lying in the sun on firm grass, free of nightmares, Cunomar looked for the hawk and could not see it. Thoughtfully, he said, “I am beginning to understand why we need to hear the soul-song of the spear. It was the sound of my own voice that was driving me mad. If I could have stayed there in silence, I would have been safe.”
“Safer maybe. That’s what the dreamers know and we must learn. We have time. The elders won’t call our long-nights until midsummer.”
“If they call them at all.”
There was no hurry to return to the steading. They lay still, each lost in his own recovery. In a while, Eneit said, “I think we went in with the wrong intent and they sensed it. I wasn’t honest, I’m sorry. I was trying to find you a gift you would value.”
“I know that.”
“I wanted you to think well of me.”
Cunomar rolled over. “I think well of you, Eneit.”
“But you know me a coward. I fled from the grave mound before you got your blade.”
“No. I know you to be honest and steady and sure and possessed of extraordinary courage. You knew what it would be like and you still went in. I wouldn’t go in there again if it were the only place in the world where I might find myself a blade. You have the courage of a dreamer. I couldn’t begin to match it.”
Cunomar braced his chin on one palm, raising his head so that he could look Eneit clearly in the eye. He felt a safety and a certainty of himself and of the world that was new to him, and welcome beyond all expressing. Questions had been asked that probed the core of who he was and he found himself happy with the answers. Between himself and Eneit, everything and nothing had changed and they could still be friends. In absolute honesty, he said, “If we were in battle, there is no-one I would want more at my shield side. Before Cygfa or Braint or Ardacos, even before my mother, I would want you. In Belin’s name, I swear this is true.”
It was the best he could give, the best he had ever given. It was, it seemed, more than had been expected. They were an arm’s reach apart. Cunomar reached out and offered his hand in the warrior’s clasp. Eneit took it; his hand was slimy with old sweat but steady. They held tight a long time. Eneit loosed first. His smile was widely lazy, if a little crooked. “Thank you.”
“You don’t have to say that.”
“No. But I mean it.” He rolled to his feet and stretched, clicking the joints in his back. “I don’t think we should tell my mother where we’ve been.”
Cunomar rose, grinning. “Do I look as if I want my skin flayed from my body? I wouldn’t think of it. But I think we should talk to Graine when we get back.”
There was no time to talk to Graine. They returned to a steading that buzzed like a swarming hive. Eight Roman cavalrymen stood beside their horses just inside the gates, staring ahead as if those around them did not exist. One, less well schooled than his comrades, turned his head to stare at Cunomar. Distaste and a pained superiority flashed from man to boy. For the second time in a day, the Boudica’s son felt his heart falter and learned what it was to cross the boundaries of his own courage.
Ardacos met him as he walked past the last of the sentries. The warrior bridled in the presence of the enemy and anyone with half an eye could see that he ached for his sword.
Speaking rapidly, in the dialect of Mona, he said, “Get yourself cleaned and be ready to leave for Camulodunum. There’s to be a meeting of the client kings at the colony to bless the new temple, and ’Tagos has business after with the governor. You are required to attend him. The governor wishes to meet the ‘King’s’ new family.”
Ardacos spat, which was probably treason. Before the morning, Cunomar would have crowed at the sight of it. Now, he had other preoccupations. He said, “I am not of ’Tagos’ family. Why do I have to go?”
“Because, in the eyes of Rome, you are his son, which is all that matters. You leave after noon.”
The world beyond Eneit and a dead man’s sword came slowly back into focus. It was not the safe land they had left in the morning. Cunomar caught Ardacos’ arm. “Wait—mother is going to Camulodunum? Are you mad? She can’t go. She’ll be recognized. What if one of the Romans has served in the west and fought against her when she led the warriors of Mona?”
“Then we’ll have to hope that the circumstances have dulled his memory. She has no choice. The invitation expressly requests the presence of the king and his new wife. It may have been written as a request, but the governor of Britannia is not a man to be denied. If she refused to go the cavalry would bind her and throw her on horseback, or try to.”
“But—”
“Airmid says the best way to hide is to be seen most clearly. That’s why your mother sent the gift-knives to the governor when she did. People see what they think they are seeing and the governor is no different. We have put out word that she is a metalsmith of the northern Eceni and she carries a gift that will, when he opens it, take all of his attention.”
“We have to hope so, or we will all die with her.” Cunomar found himself less afraid of that than he had been. He wanted to share with Ardacos the finds of the morning but the she-bear warrior was not in the mood to hear stories of ghosts and weapons. He was closed in on himself, as if pained. On the sudden cold gust of intuition, Cunomar said, “You’re coming with us, surely?”
“No. The invitation was extended to the family only. Neither your friend nor I can go.” Ardacos’ gaze slid sideways to Eneit. “Your mother thinks she knows where you’ve been. I’d have a good story of hunting an injured deer deep in the forest, if I were you, and make sure there’s no holes in it. You’ll have the next ten days to keep it right without Cunomar to spoil it.”
Cunomar felt a wrench that caught at his breathing. “Are you serious? Eneit can’t come? Why not? He’s my honour guard; I need him.” He had never said that before, not openly.
Ardacos grimaced. His eyes held pity and sorrow and a depth of concern that they had never shown on Mona. He forced a smile that touched neither of them and faded fas
t. “I’m sorry, no. ’Tagos has forbidden Airmid to go on the grounds she might try to curse the governor. I can’t see he’ll let a dreamer’s son who’s just spent the morning in a grave mound go in her stead.”
Ardacos clapped Eneit on the shoulder. “Look on the bright side. If Cunomar and all his family are hanged for treason, you can have Sinochos’ blade all to yourself.”
CHAPTER 12
FROST SPARKED ON THE LIME-WASHED WALLS AND RED ROOF tiles of the hospital at Camulodunum. Almost alone of the buildings in the veterans’ colony, which had once been the fortress of the XXth legion, it was unchanged. Theophilus of Athens, physician and mender of souls, stood with his hand on the latch and breathed in the cold air. Here, the new day was still; the clouds of his last exhalation hung around his head. Elsewhere, men, women and children were stirring, as they did in every city, town and village throughout the empire; fires were being kindled, buckets filled, chickens fed, livestock moved to new pastures.
The walls that had once hemmed the fortress had been gone for a decade. Without them, Theophilus could see the full sweep of the horizon and the thin blue threads of rising smoke that marked the waking of a thousand homes. As he did every morning, he offered a prayer to the vast, impersonal universe, that the day should not see too many of their occupants brought to him sick or injured. He did not do so for himself; his life was medicine and he enjoyed the challenge, but he had never been one to ignore the human cost of those things that gave his life meaning.