by Manda Scott
The man who faced him was more than ruthless; Efnís embodied a power that gave life to the door carvings simply by his presence. The gods of his people walked with him and through him and they were not inclined to pity. His eyes looked through Valerius as if they had never met except in battle.
“No,” he said again. “Luain mac Calma is not yours to whistle to heel like a hound. If the boy dies, it is your loss, not ours.”
Valerius caught the fraying edge of his anger and held it. When one has no power, temper is a luxury not to be indulged. He said, “The loss would be also mac Calma’s. If Bellos dies, I am free to go and our year together will be less than half over. I doubt very much if he would have subjected you to our presence through the winter had he not wished me to remain beyond spring.”
“Nevertheless, I will not summon him. If the gods wish the boy dead, he will die. If not, he will live. If he is blind, he is still alive and that will suffice.”
If he is blind… Valerius had not mentioned Bellos’ blindness to the dreamer. Efnís could only have known from some other source.
Valerius’ anger did rise then, whitely, so that he felt the pressure on his cheekbones and behind his eyes. He stared at the warriors surrounding him and they matched him, hate for hate. Not caring to conceal the challenge, he said, “Did you make this happen, any of you?”
Three warriors stepped forward, hounds straining at the leash. The death of the red-haired woman clung to them, demanding vengeance in kind. Valerius felt the pull of battle as a rising tide in his blood. For Bellos’ sake, he fought it. “Efnís, did you make him blind?”
The dreamer shook his head. “No. But mac Calma said that if the boy fell it might happen. He has fallen and you are here asking our help when you have not approached the great-house in six months. Why else would that be so?”
“Did mac Calma leave instruction for what I should do if such a thing came about?”
“No.”
Valerius opened his mouth and shut it again. There was a change in Efnís, a barely perceptible softening of his voice. He had not said, “I’m sorry”—he could not do so in such company—but the words had been there for one desperate to hear them.
Dry-mouthed, fearing to believe, Valerius said, “Then, without help from the Elder, what would you do in my place?”
The ghost of a smile crossed Efnís’ features. “I would dream, what else? It is my training. And my birthright. I would find a place of god-given power and I would use everything I could find there to help me.” His gaze slid past Valerius towards the hut that lay down near the river: the dreamer’s hut which had, for nearly twenty years, contained and moulded Airmid’s god-given power.
Valerius caught himself at the last minute so that he did not turn to look. The movement became instead a jerky sweep of his cleaner hand through his hair. He did it without thought and did not know how much of the boy Bán he had been showed in that move. He said, “Let me be clear. In my place, you would dream to mac Calma to call him back?”
Efnís leaned one shoulder against the gate post and the forefinger of his left hand traced again and again the shape of a running horse that was carved at the level of his heart. This time his smile was open for everyone to see, and it was not kind. “No,” he said. “I am more arrogant than that. If I needed help, I would dream to ask the gods for a healing. But if mac Calma had not taught me how to do that, then yes, I might dream to the Elder of Mona himself and ask for his help. It would be almost as good.”
I would dream. It is my birthright.
The words danced in the flames of a birchwood fire. Familiar faces resolved and dissolved beside them, casting shadows in the smoke. Efnís smiled intermittent encouragement from the heart-fire but would not speak. Theophilus, physician to the legions, shook his head and laughed at the fantasies of barbarian minds; Xenophon of Cos, physician to emperors, did not laugh but neither did he offer advice. Longinus Sdapeze smiled a greeting, a cavalry officer with not the slightest hint of dreaming about him, and later, with old barriers burned to ashes, Corvus appeared and sat for a while, watching the long trail of the dead who had followed him.
The ghosts of Valerius’ past did not arm themselves with anger as they had once done. Eceni and Trinovante, Roman and Gaul, they came and went, dispassionately, nodding curtly to the man who had slain them, but not hurling curses or promising an eternity of retribution. It might have been easier if they had done; none of them was a dreamer, none of them knew how to summon a dreamer, or if they did, they were not prepared to share their secret.
If you had stayed with your people, would you have become a smith, do you think, or a healer?
My sister was to be the dreamer. I was going to be a warrior.
It is my birthright.
And mine also.
He believed it, because he wanted to. Through the cold and sweating night, Julius Valerius, who had been born Bán of the Eceni, son of a dreamer—son of two dreamers—and childhood friend to several others, drew on every memory of his youth while he held or burned or drank or prayed over every god-touched item in Airmid’s hut in an increasingly desperate effort to call any of those, living or dead, who might help him to reach the gods or, as a close second best, Luain mac Calma.
He failed.
“You’re trying too hard.”
“What?”
“You’re trying too hard.” Bellos spoke sleepily from beyond the smoke. He sounded amused but there was no telling how long he had waited, lying awake, until he was sure he could sound so. “I know nothing about dreaming but all night I have listened to you shouting down the dream-paths of the poppy and I don’t think the gods are brought closer by shouting. The apprentice who brought the oat bannocks says that the gods speak only into silence.”
Valerius felt the motion of his mind crash into rock. He stared across the fire at the boy. “What apprentice?”
“There’s a girl of the Caledonii who has come twice now. Her people have not suffered under Rome and so she doesn’t hate us as much as the rest and it seems she has an affection for bedridden boys with blond hair and blue ey—Don’t be like that. I’m not a whore any more. She brought me oat bannocks and a hound whelp that wanted to play, that’s all.”
“Really? How very disappointing for both of you.” Valerius’ head swam. Facts collided and fell out at random. He said, “Let me get this straight. You spoke about dreaming, with a dreamer of Mona, who did not try to peel your skin from your back? Was this before or after you had the poppy?” The certainties of his winter faltered and then disintegrated as his stomach, his mouth and his flooding saliva registered the single most important fact. “You have been hoarding oat bannocks and you didn’t tell me?”
“I’m not hoarding them. Yes, I spoke to a dreamer. It was before I fell and I hadn’t taken any poppy. We talked of the whelp, and she said that when hounds sleep and dream by the fire, they are visiting the lands of the gods. She didn’t offer to show me how to follow them. And I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the bannocks. I was saving them for a celebration when I’d stood and matched you two strokes.” His voice faltered only a little and recovered its humour as he fumbled in his pocket, then: “Here—catch.”
It was not a bad throw for a blind youth, and not a bad catch for a man who had sat awake through the night. The bannock became only mildly singed in the heart of the fire and possibly the better for it.
Valerius said, “Are there any more?” and then, when Bellos nodded and held up a single finger, “Put it next to the fire to warm it. I think there’s some honey left somewhere,” and so, for a moment, the world was no bigger than a meal remembered with joy from childhood, washed down with stream water and eaten in the first light of the morning sun.
Presently, thinking, Valerius said, “I don’t understand why Macha didn’t come through the fire with the other ghosts. For ten years, she haunted every sleeping dream and too much of the days. Why, when I need her, does she stay away?”
“Becau
se you need her, perhaps? It does not seem to me that your mother’s haunting was designed to help you in your times of need.”
“No. But she didn’t kill me, or drive others to kill me, and there were times when she could have done.”
Valerius lay on his stomach, his head pillowed on his forearm, staring into the fire. “If the bannock-girl would help you, I could go to Hibernia to find mac Calma.”
“If you will give me two days to learn, I can find where everything is in the hut and I won’t need anyone’s help. I can move to the midden and back and there is food enough for a month unless you’ve eaten it all in the night while I was asleep.”
It was a poor attempt at humour. Valerius ignored it. “No. I can’t leave you alone. What if you were to fall again?”
“I might go deaf as well?” Bellos rolled onto his side and pushed himself to sitting. Staring at where he thought Valerius sat, he said, very quietly, “You have to leave me, Julius. I would rather manage here alone in hope than wait with you through the spring for mac Calma to come back, praying daily to your gods and mine to hear his voice. I don’t think I have the strength for that.”
Bellos had more strength than either of them had realized, in body as well as in mind. Valerius stayed for a day and guided him through continual practice, at the end of which the youth could prepare a meal without cutting his fingers and had demonstrated that he could find a jug and drag himself to the stream to fill it.
Towards dusk, the bannock-girl appeared with a jointed hare and Valerius walked off to check on the horses, leaving Bellos to speak to her. Returning, he found Bellos with more colour to his cheeks than at any time since he had fallen, and a smile that was not so clearly forced. A pot simmered on the fire and the smell of stewed hare meat and wild garlic filled the still air by the stream.
They ate together after dark when there was nothing else to practise or to clear or to clean. Bellos said, “I told her you’d be gone with the dawn and that, whether you found mac Calma or not, you’d be back by the full moon. I think she’ll help while you’re gone. She won’t be in trouble for it. Efnís knows that she comes here.”
“I thought he might.” Valerius had spent his walk considering the timeliness of the girl’s appearances. “I’d wager that mac Calma told them both to act as they did before he left. Very little he does seems to rely on chance.”
“I was right, then? You will leave with the dawn?”
“I will, unless I can call mac Calma tonight in the dream. It’s worth trying. You never know; the hare is Nemain’s beast and Airmid was always of Nemain. Perhaps having eaten the god’s beast in the god’s domain, I will find that I can live true to my birthright.”
Bellos stared at him. For the first time since his fall, his eyes focused close to where Valerius sat. He asked, “Does that matter to you now?”
“Only as a tool. I am tired of being another man’s toy. If I could heal you on my own, I would do, you know that. Because I can’t, I must call on mac Calma’s aid. If I could call the gods on my own, to ask their help in healing, I would be free of all men.”
Bellos laid down his bowl and stretched out like a hound near the fire. “And would it be good to be free of all men?”
“It would be little short of perfect.”
As an officer of the auxiliary cavalry, Julius Valerius had passed many nights without sleep in situations far less clement than a firelit hut on a stream’s edge, with his belly filled and the scents of garlic, woodsmoke and hare’s meat warming his senses.
Perhaps because of that, he did not, as he had intended, remain awake to seek the gods’ help in the fire, but slept and, in sleeping, dreamed, disjointedly and unpleasantly, of his mother and mac Calma walking, sleeping, lying together as lovers in the ancient, sacred places of Hibernia in the year before his birth.
Rome had been a distant enemy then, and all conflicts small, although they had not seemed so. Valerius’ mother had been young, and not angry. She had felt the presence of the boy-child growing in her womb and had loved him. She had lain alone under a white full moon and named the child Bán, meaning white in the language of Hibernia, for the colour of it. Pressing her hands together over his heartbeat and hers, she said, “You will be Nemain’s, and will grow in her care. I will see to it.”
Luain mac Calma had come to her later, with news of conflict growing in Gaul and the death of the dreamers at the hands of Rome. Macha had always known that he must leave, but Valerius, who had once been Bán, felt in the womb and in his dreaming self the pain of their parting, the emptiness of promises not made because they would be hollow.
The loss was too sharp to be borne. Breaking free from his mother, Valerius watched from afar as she bought a good mare from the Hibernian breeding herds and a hound that had taken deer in full flight and journeyed east, to the village of her birth where her sister had a two-year-old girl-child by a man named Eburovic.
Macha was clearly pregnant when she arrived. Eburovic did not love her, nor she him, but they had known one another from childhood and there was a great affection between them. His fathering of her child was to be a temporary thing, until Luain mac Calma came back from Gaul. Neither the gods nor the dreamers told them it would be close to fourteen years before the Elder’s return.
The dream of Macha wavered as she came closer to birth. Breaca was there, a fox-haired girl-child learning to walk with Graine, her mother, but it was Eburovic, big and blunt and kind-hearted, with nothing of the dreamer about him at all, who, smiling, filled the last, thinly woven moments.
Valerius woke, too sharply, and lay with his eyes open gazing at the shuddering light on the back wall of the hut. The fire burned behind him, warming the small of his back. He stared at stone and saw the face of Luain mac Calma, wet from the shipwreck with his black hair hanging in sea-ropes to his shoulders.
The man smiled, sadly. “Eburovic raised you. It was the gods’ will, not mine, but he did it well, however much I might regret it. Still, you are my son, not his. You can run, but you cannot deny who made you. I offer you now your birthright. Will you take it?”
Often before, Valerius had thought himself awake and found it not true. In Rome, he had watched Dubornos attempt to prove himself dreaming by passing his hand through a wall and had noted it as a dreamer’s technique, simple in its concept and likely to succeed. Now, he sat up and, very deliberately, put the heel of one hand against the embers of the fire, holding it there until the pain crushed his breathing and layers of reddened skin peeled away.
The pain drove both the voice and the image of mac Calma from his head, but the dream still held him, as tightly formed as any memory, and as real. Cursing softly, he found his cloak and stepped quietly past the sleeping Bellos into the night.
The night was still and warm, lit by an amber half-moon. Owls called in the woods beyond the dreamers’ great-house. Closer by, the stream whispered in foreign tongues. The small beasts of the night shuffled and blundered in old leaves and new spring grass. At the foot of the hill, the bay gelding whickered a quiet greeting.
The route Valerius took was not planned. He needed only to prove himself firmly awake and he could return to bed, to sleep one last night in a hut that he had begun to consider his own. He crossed the stream in bare feet, letting the chilled water swill at his ankles, then turned left, through the trees towards the horse fields, searching as he did so the vent in the hem of his cloak where he hid the grain for the horses.
The hawthorn hedge bounding the paddocks was served by a gap, the width of a man, but not a horse. Valerius had fitted his shoulder through and was reaching for the gelding when a voice behind him said, “When you were dreaming, which gods did you petition, yours or mine?”
He was still dreaming, then; the fire had been an illusion, as much as the water of the stream and the coarse grass beneath his feet. In this dream, he had some control of his own actions, which was pleasant. He pushed on through the hedge and met the gelding, warming his hands on a muzzle that
was nothing more than a product of his mind. The beast seemed as solid as he did in life, but then dreams always seem so from the inside. It is only on waking that one can see the gaps that make them unreal.
Mac Calma’s voice said, “Valerius, answer me. It matters.”
The voice was entirely compelling. Unwillingly, Valerius said, “I have no gods. I served Mithras once, but do so no longer. I abandoned him when I was banished from the legions. The gods of the tribes abandoned me long ago and take their vengeance where they can. I called on none of them by name, only made my need known.”
“So. And it surprises you, therefore, that none came? Have you learned so little in your life?”
“You sound like my mother. Her ghost despises me also. Are you dead, then, that you can sound so?”
“Hardly. I don’t despise you. It is you who hates me. Have you found the key to Bellos’ healing?”
In dreaming there is an honesty that waking may lack. Valerius said, “No. But I have found that I no longer wish to depend on you to make it happen. It occurs to me that you have never told me why you brought me here. If it was to learn healing, you have never tried to teach it, or dreaming, but then I have never asked to learn. I remember, once, the grandmothers saying that a dreamer must ask to be given the dream. Last night, I asked it of the nameless gods. Tonight, I ask it of you.”
“Thank you.” The hedge shivered and Luain mac Calma stood in the moonlight, soothing the neck of the gelding, which was not surprised to see him.
Valerius tried to pass his hand through the horse and failed. He stared at his feet and moved his toes and they remained his toes and did not become cloven, or bird-clawed, or grow the nails of a hound. Self-loathing curdled in the pit of his stomach. Raising his head, he said bitterly, “You woke me. Why?”
Mac Calma shook his head in mild reproof. “To save you taking ship with the dawn to look for me. I thought I might prevent at least one journey’s seasickness. Some men might be grateful.”