by Manda Scott
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.
Through the dark of winter and nights spent awake listening to the distant howl of the she-bear singers in the great-house, Valerius had built in his mind the moment when Bellos could stand and hold a blade and match two strokes against him. Or even one stroke. One would be enough.
He knelt at the side of the straw mat. The sun was still weak and the shadows it cast were not fully black. Bellos lay with his head on a slight upward slope at mac Calma’s insistence, to keep the blood from filling the crack in his skull. Valerius dipped a hank of raw wool in a pitcher of water and wiped the boy’s face clear of sweat. Eyes the colour of cornflowers blinked up at him. Bellos smiled, faintly. “What happens if I don’t try to stand?”
Valerius sat back on his heels. “If you can’t even try, then I build up the fire and boil the water for the wormwood infusion.”
The wide eyes widened further. “Again? I thought we’d finished that.”
“No. According to mac Calma’s instructions, it needs to be taken for the first nine days of each new moon until you can stand. Yesterday was the old moon. Today it’s new.”
“And if I try to stand?”
“If you can raise more than a hand’s breadth off the floor, then we don’t need the wormwood, we can go on to the vervain and hare’s foot.” He grinned encouragingly. “It only tastes of hounds’ urine, not like the rotted dung of a badger in season spiked with putrid shellfish, as the wormwood does.”
“Thank you so much.” Bellos’ eyes drifted closed. His strength had its limits and talking sapped it. Presently, without opening them, he said, “You know, I have an urge to pass water onto real grass, not into a jug held by another man. Do you suppose we could set that as a reasonable target? I know it’s not the same as matching you with a blade, but it’s a good place to start.”
It was a very good place to start. They had nine days of wormwood infusions and were on the last sliver of the old moon by the time Bellos, kneeling, passed water on his own onto good honest turf.
Valerius held his shoulder to stop him from falling forward, but only lightly. As milestones go, it was a great one only to these two, but to them it was greater than a victory against a legion. Later that night, with Bellos propped up on a sack of dried mosses, they burned the last of mac Calma’s dried wormwood in celebration.
“You should have become a dreamer, Julius Valerius, not a killer of men.”
Bellos said it one evening in mid-spring, speaking from the cool of his day-seat. He could sit now for half-days at a time, and could hold himself up to pass motions and water. His skin was stronger with greater colour so that his vessels no longer made patterns across his temples, nor throbbed as he spoke. His arms had gained strength before his legs and Valerius had set him exercises for both, giving him strands of rawhide to plait into ropes as work for his fingers and a boar’s bladder filled with straw as somewhat less profitable labour for his feet.
When he had proved he could lift the bladder between his ankles and hold it steady for a count of twenty, Valerius took it away to fill it with the coarse-grained sand from the edge of the strait, near to where the ferry left and landed on its thrice-daily trips to the mainland. He had just returned, juggling the bladder and a length of seaweed that, smoke-dried and powdered, might help the red mare to overcome her bouts of colic, when Bellos delivered his judgement. Valerius threw him the bladder, saying nothing.
It was a difficult throw. Bellos caught it, sagging a little under the new weight. He balanced it on the ends of his feet without looking; all his attention was on his companion. “I’m serious,” he said. “Dreamers are healers and you have the gift. My mother could heal almost as you do, before the slavers took her, and my father’s grandfather, but I have met few others.”
Valerius absorbed himself in his rinsing of the seaweed. Without looking up, he said mildly, “Perhaps they were not there to be met in the slums of Gesoriacum. I can’t imagine a healer would choose to spend time in Fortunatus’ whorehouse.”
It was a mark of how far they had come that Bellos would talk now of his family in the few years before his capture and that Valerius could make a joke of the filthy, louse-infested tavern from which he had bought the equally filthy Belgic urchin who had been offered him as an afternoon’s entertainment.
Bellos grinned and twisted his plaited rope into a halter. His hands moved with an easy fluidity as if they had always made rope of leather and given it a beauty that was lost to most.
After a while, he said idly, “my father always said I would make a good potter. It was his trade and he expected his sons to follow him. If you had stayed with your people, would you have become a smith, do you think, or a healer?”
“I was going to be a warrior. My sister was to be the dreamer, or she thought she was.”
“But you didn’t agree?”
Valerius looked up. They did not often speak of his sister. His eyes showed the danger of it, the proximity to places not even Bellos could go. He said, “She killed an armed warrior with a single thrust of a hunting spear when she was twelve. She woke from sleep and had no shield nor time to plan her actions. No, I didn’t ever think she would be anything but a warrior.”
“So then you were proved right.”
“Yes.”
“And was it because of that, you, too, took to the sword?”
Valerius lifted his dripping seaweed from the river and sat back on his heels. His face was clear and his smile bland. Only his eyes were more hooded than they had been, as if there were things behind they might prefer to hide. “No,” he said. “I did that because Rome paid me to. When I was a slave, nobody came to buy me from Amminios’ household. Signing up with the auxiliary was the only alternative left.”
Bellos recognized the warnings and chose to ignore them. He had come this far before and backed away. Knowing exactly what he did, he said, “Corvus would have bought you, I think.”
The hooded eyes became quite blank. The smile was an automatic one, distantly polite. “Possibly, but I did not wish to be bought by Corvus.”
“Why not, when you loved him?”
His last words fell into silence. Valerius’ speed and lightness of foot had surprised Bellos from the first moments in the whorehouse. Now, in the spring sun on Mona, the boy found himself abruptly alone. He forgot, sometimes, the depth of pain in the other man, and the oceans of anger that kept it submerged. He shook his head at himself and the watching gods and looked around for the wren that had taken to visiting. It came almost to his hand daily whenever he was on his own. Being entirely alone now, and likely to be so for some time, he whistled and reached for an oat bannock he had saved and scattered pieces of it out on the streamside.
Nothing more was said until two days later when Valerius emerged from the back of the hut with two rolled goat hides. He laid them out one across the other on the turf in front of Bellos, who surveyed them with evident curiosity. “What’s in there? Crutches?
“No. I think we can bypass those.” Valerius took one end of a hide and rolled it out. Metal clashed on metal as two blades skidded free on the grass.
Bellos’ face changed in much the same way it did when he was asked to drink wormwood. “What are they?”
“Practice blades. What do they look like?” Valerius grinned. “Your father said you could make a good potter. Myself, I think you would have made a warrior had you been given the chance. Luain mac Calma will be back by the next moon’s end. He said if you could match me two strokes, standing, we would be free to go back to Hibernia. I thought it would be good if we could show him something more than simply two strokes.”
“You would make a warrior of me?” Bellos laughed, weakly. The wren, which had been feeding on a rock, flittered away, crying alarm. “Julius, you can’t be serious!”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m
terrified of fighting. I sat behind you on your horse while you killed Romans in Gesoriacum and I have never been so scared in my life. If Fortunatus had stepped like Neptune from the seas and offered to take me back to the tavern and beat me daily for the rest of my life, I’d have thanked him for it.”
“Really? Not afterwards, you wouldn’t. The man was obscene. In any case, terror is the right place to start. If you walk onto a battlefield and don’t have your heart stuck in your throat, you’ll be dead before you have time to realize your mistake.”
Bellos shook his head. “I’ve watched you fight, Julius. I had my arms round your waist. I could feel each and every crash of your heartbeat. You were desperate. You were murderously angry. Near the end, at the sea’s edge, you were anxious about the ship, not knowing where it might take us. Never, at any moment, were you afraid.”
The sun warmed them both equally, but Valerius’ skin was, briefly, the darker. He shrugged. “Sometimes anger covers fear. When there’s no choice, it’s useful. Here—take this and we’ll work with you seated until the full moon. After it, we’ll see if we can get you standing.”
“I’m not a warrior. You can’t make me into one.” Bellos sat on his three-legged stool, panting, and ran a shaking hand through sweat-darkened hair. A gash ran the length of his forearm and his shoulders were dark with old bruises, some of them green at the margins. “Why can’t we practise with wooden staves as children do? Did mac Calma say it had to be a real sword?”
“He did, actually. In any case, children don’t practise with staves if they want to live beyond their first battle. Warriors who practise with wood are the second rank to die in any conflict, after those who think they are too big to be afraid. Wood doesn’t teach the reflexes necessary to face iron.”
“But I’m not going to face iron, except yours, and you want me to win so we can go home. You’re not going to try to kill me. This is pointless.” Bellos hurled his blade at the ground. It hit a rock, ringing. “I can match you two strokes sitting. That’s enough. All we need now is for me to be standing and for you not to be—Julius? Are you listening? I said, I need to be standing and then we can …”
He trailed into silence. Speaking to empty air was becoming too much of a habit, particularly when that air was filled by a living man, the entirety of whose attention was given elsewhere. Bellos stared out along the line of Valerius’ fixation and saw, on the track beyond the great-house, a delegation of dreamers walking with funereal slowness around a hand-carried bier. Nothing could be seen of the body lying thereon but the colour of the hair, which was the copper red of a winter fox. Leading the dreamers was a man who was not Luain mac Calma, but who carried himself with the same authority.
In a voice wiped clean of emotion, Valerius breathed a name—“Efnís”—and was gone.
It was not yet the full moon, but the day was young and warm. Abandoned for a man of greater interest, Bellos set himself to complete alone the last of mac Calma’s requirements.
He was lying near the stream when Valerius returned, with his head uphill, as the healer mac Calma had dictated. As mac Calma had emphatically not dictated, his head lay on one edge of the wren’s rock; gelling blood made a dark mess of his hair and leaked a little onto the earth below.
“Bellos—”
“I know. Don’t shout at me. I have a headache.” Bellos opened both eyes, too wide and too suddenly. “Was it your sister on the bier?”
“What? No, it was a dreamer who tried to infiltrate the fortress of the Twentieth legion. The inquisitors had her for three days. The legate ordered what was left of her body to be dumped within sight of the ferry. What have you—”
“And is the dreamer, Efnís, once again your friend?”
“No. He loathes me. Without mac Calma’s protection, he would do to us what Rome has just done to the dead dreamer. You know that. Is Efnís the reason you—”
“No. I just wanted to see what the world looked like from standing. It’s been so long, I’ve forgotten.” Bellos’ grin was a shadow of the morning’s easy cheer. “Or, if you want to wallow in guilt, we could say it’s all your fault because you wanted me to stand and fight. So if we’re both equally to blame, we don’t need to argue about it. Could you move me out of the sun sometime soon, do you think? It’s too strong and it’s hurting my eyes. I can’t see you properly.”
His head rocked sideways and it became apparent that he was weeping; slow, thin tears had already coursed their tracks on his cheeks. His gaze, clearly meant for Valerius, was directed a half turn too far, so that he stared instead at the blank side wall of Airmid’s hut.
“Oh, gods, Bellos …” Valerius knelt. He passed a hand in front of the over-bright gaze. When nothing happened, he moved his head so that he looked the boy straight in the eyes. “Bellos? Can you see me?”
The world grew cold in the small hiatus where there should have been an answer. Valerius felt the small rush of nausea that used to come whenever Corvus had been wounded. “Oh, gods,” he said again. “Bellos, I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t.” A pale hand fumbled for his and, finding it, gripped gently, as if Valerius, and not the boy, were injured. “Just get me inside and give me the wormwood or whatever other unspeakable concoction your Hibernian healer left behind and all will be well.” Bellos’ grin was more certain this time. “I’ve had all afternoon to think about this. Luain mac Calma talks to the gods as the rest of us talk to our horses. They tell him everything that happens or might happen in the world. He must have expected it. He’ll have left something that will work.”
Luain mac Calma may have conversed daily with the gods, but they did not see all futures, nor tell him all of those they saw. Amongst the many wax-plugged bottles and beakers of his pharmacy, nothing had properties that could restore sight to the suddenly blinded.
Valerius knew that, but he searched anyway, because it was expected of him and it gave hope, which was necessary. On exactly that basis, he poured out a half-measure of dried and ground goose grass which was good only for an inflammation of the eyes, not true blindness, and mixed it with dock roots and gall to make it taste bad to hide the vervain and poppy which would buy an untroubled sleep.
He succeeded only in part; Bellos drank as he was asked to, but in the waiting time before sleep, while Valerius laid clods of wet wool on his hair to leach out the blood, he said, thinly, “If mac Calma left nothing, then there is nothing we can do, is there?” Then, when Valerius gave no answer, “Perhaps you could put in more poppy next time? I could bear life as a boy who has poor use of his legs. I am not at all sure I want to live it as a man who is both crippled and blind.”
They were in a dreamer’s hut, where, more than anywhere, words have power. With his left hand, Valerius made the sign to ward against evil. “Don’t say that. You fell and hit your head and it’s bleeding within the bone as well as outside. When the bleeding stops, you will see again.”
“And the pain in my head will be less? I hope so. You should have put in more poppy anyway. There wasn’t enough to draw a veil over this.”
Bellos was wrong: the poppy was sufficient to buy him dreamless sleep; and he was right: in the morning, the pain in his head was no less and he was still blind.
“We need mac Calma.”
Valerius said it, because Bellos would not. He had carried the boy to the midden to relieve himself and fed him and washed him and their life was as it had been in the first days, except that this time Bellos’ mind was alive and active and, when not crushed by the pounding ache within it, he could think and speak clearly. Now, he said, “We may as well need snow in summer. Unless I have lost more time than I know of, our god-favoured dreamer isn’t due back until the end of next month.”
“Perhaps not, but we can summon him, or, rather, Efnís can. He is Elder of Mona in mac Calma’s absence—there must always be one so designated on the island, to hold the dream of the ancestors. There are ways for one dreamer to speak to another if the need is strong enough.”
Bellos stared dry-eyed at the place he believed Valerius to be. “Efnís won’t call mac Calma for you.”
“No. But he may call him for you. I can ask. At worst he can only say no.”
CHAPTER 14
“No.”
“Efnís, Bellos is not your enemy. He is as much a victim of Rome as any man or woman of the tribes. He was sold into slavery when he was six years old. He was sold again nightly in a brothel in Gaul for the next four years. He was kicked in the head trying to foal the red mare because he didn’t want to wake me and he fell because he was trying to fulfil Luain mac Calma’s ludicrous requirements so that we could leave your precious island and go back to Hibernia. If he isn’t healed, we may never leave. Is that what you want?”
Valerius stood at the entrance to the great-house, as close as he had ever been to the heart of Mona’s dreaming. Oak uprights as wide as his arm and twice his height stood as door posts on either side. The carvings on them made his head spin as they had done once in his childhood. To avoid them, he looked straight ahead, towards the fire trenches and weapons, the warriors and dreamers within.
Eight warriors stood around him in a part-circle and the waves of hate were as tangible as any he had felt on a battlefield in a burning village. Some of them were not much older than Bellos. It was possible that Valerius had, indeed, burned their homes and hanged their families.
Efnís stood in the centre. He had been a quiet lad in his youth, thoughtful and open-hearted, and the boy Bán had cared for him and cherished his presence. He had not imagined him ruthless, but then, he had not imagined it of himself and had become so, for a time.