by Manda Scott
This hound was bigger than Hail, close to the size he had imagined Hail to be when the skewed scales of childhood had made all hounds vast and Hail greatest of them all. Its hair was long and coarse as Hail’s had been and, in the dark, Valerius was free to imagine the patternings of white on brindle that had given his first hound, the best of all hounds, its name. He buried his face in the wild ruff of its mane. The smell smothered him; hound and woodsmoke and hunted hare and family and home and all things lost.
The man he had been would have walked away from that rather than remember it. The man he had become, product of the dark and the gods and the unknowing, walked willingly into the mire of his past and begged it to drown out the voice of Luain mac Calma.
It worked, for a while, possibly for days—he had no means to measure the passage of time—but it could not last for ever. Luain mac Calma reached out to him from the recent past, blocking any further escape. His voice was more solid than it had been, as if he spoke from the bedrock of the chamber.
Any failure means death, not only of your body but of your soul.
Failure.
The blackness stank of it, and would not be made clear.
Faced with no other choice, Julius Valerius, who had once been Bán of the Eceni, pushed the hound’s head from his thigh, drew his knees for a second time to his chest and began at last to consider exactly what it might mean to lose his soul.
The process was not pretty, or dignified. To imagine the loss of his soul, he first had to discover it, to map its margins, its contours and textures and the many ways in which he had not lived by its calling. He had believed himself honest in his own dishonesties; possessed of an integrity which, if warped by the standards of his family, tribe and friends, was nevertheless true to itself. Every action he had ever taken had been tested against the too-sharp weapon of his own judgement and the fabric of his life had been woven around it.
With an honesty that stripped to the bare bones every hidden feeling, Valerius set about testing the truth of that. Far more than mac Calma had asked for, he stepped back to the earliest memory of his life and walked forward through the months and years, cataloguing for himself and the absent gods every failure of integrity, every self-lie, every instance of mortal weakness.
If he were to guess, another day and part of a night might have passed in the slow unpicking of his life’s failings. The hound left once and came back, smelling of fresh blood and, less strongly, of urine. It did not bring any meat for Valerius, but it was doubtful if he could have eaten by then; he was too immersed in the dismantling of himself.
He expected the ghosts to come, hissing their anger and sucking at his sanity for vengeance as they had done when their deaths were fresh. Perversely, their absence left him hollow; there had been comfort in the discomfort of their rage. He did not ask for the gods’ help and they, unpetitioned, did not answer. Every step was taken alone, without assistance, and by their absence Valerius came finally, unwillingly, to recognize their presence in all that had gone before; whether he liked it or not, every part of his life had been shaped within the protective arms of the unnamed gods.
Even now. Even here. He passed through the last memory and came to rest in the present and he was not alone. The gods of his past were all around: Briga and Mithras, Nemain and Jupiter and Manannan of the waves who made him sick but did not kill him. The chamber was crowded by their presences, watching, waiting for him to act. The hound felt them and whined, stretching a warm tongue to his wrist as comfort for them both.
Aloud, Valerius said, “What do you want of me?”
The gods gave no answer. Their silence crushed him. Their waiting drove him, ultimately, to act.
Over hours, over days, Valerius attempted every feat of dreaming he had ever imagined—and failed in each one. He built images in the dark and they melted. He spoke tales that mac Calma had told him and their heroes did not come alive. He named the thousand ghosts of his dead and they walked past and past until all that was left was the memory of their shadows. He viewed and reviewed and discarded every particle of his life, scouring the passageways of his soul until the winds whistled through and he was emptied of all thought and all feeling. The gods watched and waited and offered nothing.
You’re trying too hard. Bellos spoke from the safest part of his past.
Valerius said, “I know. I don’t know how to do anything different.”
The hound came to sit in front of him. In his memory, its eyes were amber. He chose to think of them so. He held its great head between both of his hands and said, “Friend, I’m sorry. You have guarded the wrong man against dangers that did not come from the outside. I wish you luck with the others who come after me.”
He did not end out of self-pity, or bitterness, but only because there was nothing else he could do. Pressing the flat of both palms to the floor, Valerius pushed himself upright against protesting joints and muscles that burned from too long cramped tight. The roof of the chamber rubbed the top of his head. Stretching out both hands, he touched his palms to the stone on either side. The hound pressed its chin against his thigh. If life had been different, it would have been good to have ridden with it into battle.
He bowed a little to the waiting dark. “I have failed. I apologize. Perhaps I would always have done so. I thank you for keeping me from the understanding of this long enough to live the life that I have done. With all its failings, with the deaths and the loss and the pain, it has been the fullest and best it could have been, for which I offer my deepest thanks.”
He expected no answer and was given none. He felt his way round the walls and came to the tunnel that the ancestors had built. Crawling in, full of hope, he had felt the place a womb and had imagined himself emerging, reborn into light, a man at peace with his gods and heir to the legacy of Mona’s dreamers. For that hubris alone, he deserved whatever was coming. Crawling out towards fresh air past the spiralled carvings of the past, he tried to remember the many ways in which those who had abandoned their long-nights had died. In this, too, he failed.
Valerius emerged into a night of no moon and few stars and it seemed to him bright.
Expecting death, or the slow beginnings of it, he scrambled with what dignity he could over the guard stone at the tunnel’s entrance. On the way in, the light of mac Calma’s fire had flooded the carvings on the surface of the boulder, sinking shadows into the spheres and circles etched by the ancestors. Now, there was nothing but warm winter wind and the silvered greys of a land that believed itself black.
The hound did not follow him out. He thought to call it and decided not; it was safer for it not to be caught up in whatever was coming. Putting his hands to his mouth, he sent his voice away from the dream mound.
“Hello?”
He felt foolish, more so when he was not answered. His flesh crawled and his hungry guts cramped but no-one came; no waiting dreamers, no knives, no ropes to bind him down as they flayed the skin from his chest and opened his living belly to the crows. The turves had been relaid over the circle of mac Calma’s fire. If Valerius had not sat before it for a night, awaiting the dawn to enter the chamber, he would not know where it had been.
The gods and the hound had abandoned him, but Valerius did not believe Luain mac Calma would leave before the end. Unwilling to be seen to search, he sat down on the guard stone to wait. After the intensity of the ancestors’ chamber, there was a welcome peace in not thinking.
Presently, when still no-one had come to kill him, he remembered the place where the wood was stored. Searching through a cavity in the dry southern side of the hill, he found tinder and a fire pot packed with old, dying embers. He was an officer in the auxiliary cavalry, or had been; he had built fires with less than this and been warmed by them.
Instinct drew him away from the hill, towards a swath of old oaks with a river winding through the centre. He had been a long time without water. In the dream place, it had not seemed important. In the presence of an unending stream of cold
, clear water, thirst consumed him. He lay down and sank his face into it and drank for an eternity that stretched as long as the time he had spent in the ancestors’ mound.
The cold steadied him and gave him purpose. He laid out the wood at a place where the river bent back on itself so that water surrounded three sides. His fire burned with small flames. By its light, he lay on the bank and slid his hands into the water and dribbled spit onto the surface to lure winter fish. They were few, but he was possessed of a patience that would have astonished those he had led, amongst whom the shortness of his temper had been legendary. At the blackest part of the night that comes before dawn, he caught a small trout and roasted it. The smell alone was of the gods; the taste consumed him.
Afterwards, he sat by the fire to wait. If he had been concerned for his own safety, he would have kept the river behind him as protection. Safety was the least of his concerns and so he faced east, to where the late-rising moon lifted over the horizon, and kept the water ahead and on either side with his back exposed to whoever might come.
It did not seem possible that any night would ever again seem dark. The sliver of Nemain’s moon was as bright as the noon sun. Unable to look at the god directly, Valerius watched her reflection slide over the river. Water was her domain. As a child, he had believed that proximity to water drove men mad and women madder. Now, he welcomed the calm that it gave.
The water was alive; small fish kissed the surface, larger ripples backed off stones and wove into each other, the moon broke and scattered so that the whole surface of the water became boiling silver, oddly inviting. When the shine stretched from one bank to the other, Valerius stood and shed his clothes and stepped down and out to immerse himself to the neck and beyond in water so cold that it burned.
As the ancestors’ chamber had scoured his mind, so did Nemain’s river scour his skin. He lay back with only his nose above the surface, and then not even that. His hair was longer than it had ever been and it floated behind like weed, both buoying his head and teasing it under. His skin grew to like the cold, so that the water and the smooth rocks of the river bed caressed him rather than chafing and he revelled in the feel of it, who had slept five years alone and forgotten what it was to be touched with care. He spread his arms and his legs against the current and slowly, between one breath and the next, the river became a lover, moving him with a passion as great as any he had felt for Corvus or Longinus or the unfulfilled, unacknowledged longing for Caradoc.
He fought it at first; the river did not just belong to Nemain, it was Nemain, daughter to Briga, watcher of all life, birth-bringer, holder of cycles. All his life, he had imagined this god as Airmid, so that often in his dreams the two were one. Valerius had never knowingly wanted Airmid, or any woman, could not imagine ever doing so, but the river touched him elsewhere than the flesh, and his mind was too tired to resist the pull of a god and he gave himself over to it, remembering only to breathe when the surface came to meet him.
Afterwards, he wondered why he had done that; drowning was by no means the worst way to die. Shivering, he drew himself onto the bank, cold and spent, empty in ways the dream hill had not left him. He dressed and made the fire bigger and the flames were no longer too bright to watch, nor the eastern horizon where the first fire of the sun poured molten gold on the earth.
The moon still dallied in the west, a ghosted sickle outshone by the greater light of the sun. Valerius turned to face it and sat a while, unthinking.
In the past, ghosts and gods alike had spoken to him in voices too loud to be ignored. Here, on the banks of the river that was for ever sacred to the daughter of Briga, Valerius found for the first time what it was to hear the whisper of a god, to sense a knowing that passed beyond words as Nemain came to rest in the core of his being.
She did not offer a vision of future glory, or an end to all grief; he would not have believed either of these, nor asked for them. Instead, through the slow setting of the moon, he discovered within himself the totality of all joy and all pain and the place of his soul as the balance between. It was as great a gift as he had ever been given and there seemed no possibility that it could be taken away.
Presently, when the whispering ceased and all that was left was the feather-touch of moonlight and a passing memory of water, he stood and extinguished his fire, dismantling it and covering the ash so that no trace was left of his passing.
He was kneeling, scattering dead leaves over the cut-lines of the turf when, from somewhere behind his left shoulder, Luain mac Calma asked, “Where are you going?”
It was not unexpected, only later than it might have been. Still kneeling, Valerius answered, “I was going to Mona, to find Bellos and discuss with him his future as one blind in the land of the sighted. With the right training, I believe he may still make a good healer. After that, as soon as the seas are open to shipping, I thought I might cross the water, to Britannia. I met Mithras there once, in a cave. If I am to live, I must make my peace with him.”
“And are you going to live?”
“I have no idea.”
The morning air was sharp with frost; the first furrings of it etched the oak leaves behind mac Calma, so that his hair seemed a deeper black. His face was caught partway between the sun and the moon, not quite lit by either. He wore his dreamer’s thong of rolled birch bark at his brow for the first time in nine months and the blade at his belt was curved back at the tip to make a flaying knife.
Valerius was unarmed, and had been so since they reached Hibernia. Standing, he felt more naked than he had done when he walked into the river. His skin cringed against the rub of his tunic. Nemain had not promised long life, or the absence of pain. The awareness of that hung about him, sharply.
He ran his tongue round the edge of his teeth. “What is the penalty for a man who abandons his long-nights?”
Mac Calma balanced his knife on his palm. “Death, of course. Those who do not cut their own throats or give themselves to Nemain’s water are dealt a swift death by the one standing watch. There’s no need for further retribution. Failure itself is enough.”
“Indeed.” So mac Calma had, after all, been present through it all. Valerius regretted not having searched for him more thoroughly. He said, “I have no blade of my own with which to cut my throat.”
“I know. And the river did not take you, although you gave yourself fully to the god. What does that tell you?”
“That the man who claims to be my father chooses to watch without making his presence known.” Valerius spat as they did in the legions, with much noise and a profusion of phlegm. “We should do what needs to be done. I don’t think there’s anything left to say that hasn’t been said in the last nine months. If you give me the blade, I’ll do it myself, to save you the blood taint.”
“Will you fall on the blade as do the Romans? Do you so badly want to die?”
“I don’t want to die at all. I rather think I have just been shown how to live and would welcome the chance to do so. But if there is no choice, I would rather die cleanly, by my own hand, than by the false care of another man.”
“Valerius, you always have choice.”
Mac Calma was the Elder of Mona; he could put more meaning into one sentence than others could speak in a day, and did so. A god and a world waited while the many layers of meaning span out into being.
Valerius sat on the turf where his fire had been. The last warmth kept the frost from his feet. He looked for the moon and found the last insubstantial edge of her on the western horizon. Her presence warmed his soul. Mithras had never done that, even in the cave.
He frowned and stared at his fingers and then at the grass. A number of things became clear, and unclear.
After a while, still sitting, he said, “Breaca’s long-nights did not end like this.”
Luain mac Calma shed his cloak, folded it and sat on the pad. Gooseflesh stood on the bare skin of his arms. Resting his chin on the heel of his upturned hand, he said, “Your sister was a chi
ld who had to learn what she might become as an adult and a warrior. She had to experience in the depths of her soul the reality of life and death. You were made adult before your time and there is nothing anyone, god or dreamer, could teach you of living and dying. Where others sit their long-nights to pass from childhood to adulthood, you had to pass backwards, to unlearn what you have been in order to find what else you might yet become. Have you done so?”
Nine months of questioning were thus glibly excused. Valerius considered what he was, what he had been and what he might become. The ancestors’ chamber had loosened the anchors of his past, and Nemain had given the surety of her presence through death and beyond. Neither of these offered a solid foundation on which to build a living future. One memory tugged at him. “Was the hound real? The one that shared the dark?”
“Did it seem real to you?”
“I thought so at the time.” The memory of a tongue on his wrist was as real, or unreal, as it had been in the chamber. Valerius said, “Is the hound then my dream as the hare is Airmid’s? The elder grandmother called me horse-dreamer.”
“And hare-hunter, as I remember. Which has never stopped you hunting deer, or boar.”
“Or men. Indeed. I didn’t know one could choose.”
“Few can. You are one of those few.”
“Thank you.”
More than any dreaming, Valerius badly wanted the hound to be real, to have it run from the chamber and walk at his side, to hunt with it and ride with it and remember all that was lost. Disappointment led full circle to first hope and first loss.
I offer you your birthright.
As a child that asks for the hare who lives on the moon, Valerius said, “You asked me if I had found what I might yet become. There was a time when I wanted more than anything to be a warrior but I have been that and my soul was not whole there. If I were given the choice anew, I would become a dreamer. Do I have that choice?”