Dreaming the Hound

by Manda Scott

  At the signal, two shapes darted forward from the tumble of rocks on the other side of the valley. The ropes of the makeshift corral sagged and separated where they had been cut. When a bundle of rotting wolf skin and fat was hurled into their midst, the entire herd had a clear route of escape. The panicked drum of their hooves filled the length of the valley and the mountains beyond.

  No man could sleep through that, and the Gauls, if they had any sense, had been sleeping lightly and were not drunk. Within moments, the tents began to empty. On the hillside opposite, three warriors ran lightly up away from the enclosure and the bodies on either side. They were out of range long before the first javelins were hurled at them.

  There was no need any longer for secrecy. The figure on Valerius’ left was Braint of the Brigantes, in the Boudica’s absence Warrior of Mona, leader of this raid and the half-dozen that had gone before.

  She spat on the ground in thanks to the gods and squirmed backwards and out over the crest of the hill to where three other warriors waited at a small, smouldering fire. They left on her signal, skidding light-footed down the scree, bearing ropes of woven rawhide and pouches of winter stored corn and twists of salt with which to catch up the panicked cavalry horses when they tired and came to rest beyond the mouth of the valley.

  None of them, neither Braint nor those who followed her, acknowledged Valerius’ presence, nor did he expect them to. He stood up, shaking the snow from his cloak, and stretched, tentatively, easing cold joints.

  His shoulders no longer hurt, which still amazed him. From the moment at the end of autumn when Longinus had sent him, broken and beaten, back to Mona, every part of him had screamed in pain. Bellos had taken charge of his healing, under instruction from Luain mac Calma. Through the slow months of foul infusions, sipped day and night, of poultices and bindings and the indignities of nursing, there had been a perverse satisfaction in finding first hand that he had been right and that, even blind, the Belgic youth made an exceptionally good healer.

  Until midwinter, Valerius’ bones had been so bruised and his muscles so torn that simply to sleep through the first part of the night without waking, weeping, had been an achievement. After the solstice, with the gradual lightening of the days, the breaks and the ripped ligaments had begun to heal so that if his sleep was broken, it was not by pain.

  Even so, standing on the mountainside, the memory of the inquisitors’ chamber sprang too readily to the surface of his mind. It was hard to look down on the gradually diminishing chaos among the cavalrymen in the valley, to hear the orders shouted in Latin and watch the men form a line and march forward, without feeling again the cringing concussion of fists and feet and staves that made him want to curl into a ball and hide.

  He made himself stand and watch, and not flinch as the Gaulish cavalrymen, deprived of their horses, walked towards but not into the ambush set at the narrow neck of the valley where the wide plain became a gully. They stopped in a huddle, waiting. They were not stupid; the question was not whether an ambush had been laid, only by how many they were outnumbered and whether the natives had confined themselves to spears and boulders, or whether they kept slingers among them, against whom there was no real defence except distance.

  There were slingers; Valerius had watched them leave Mona and had a fair idea of where they were stationed in the snowy scrub of the gully’s walls. Even as the officers conferred, the first slingstone cracked down from the high ground and the first of the auxiliaries died. The sound came after the sight, blustered by the wind, so that the man had already fallen and his ghost walked loose before the sharp peal of his cry floated up to the high ground above.

  Valerius turned away, reluctant to watch yet another ghost wander lost through the heather; the world was too full of those, and the gods within him had not yet shown how they might all be laid to rest. Alone, he caught up his horse and set her gently down the mountain towards the ferry. A stone rattled after him on the scree and might have been an accident, not a slingstone sent to unseat him.

  “Efnís, it’s not going to work. I am not impugning Braint’s courage, or the willingness of Mona’s warriors to fight, I am simply adding up numbers. Suetonius Paulinus was made governor precisely because he knows about mountain warfare. He has been told to make safe the west or die in the attempt and he doesn’t intend to die. He has two legions and all their cavalry: about thirteen thousand men, every one of whom will lay down his own life to save their governor’s skin. You have a little short of four thousand warriors, six if every dreamer and child over the age of five picks up a weapon. In the past month, Braint’s raids have killed fifty-three auxiliaries, for the loss of six warriors. This is good. It is laudable. It is great credit to the courage of your Warrior and those she leads. It is not enough.”

  “Did I ask for your opinion?”

  Uniquely, Efnís was alone in Mona’s great-house, standing semi-naked in the waist-deep trench of a fire pit, digging out a winter’s ash. Luain mac Calma, yet again, had taken ship for Hibernia, or perhaps Gaul, nobody knew which. In his absence, Efnís was Elder. His word was law on Mona and throughout the lands where dreamers still held sway. That he took it upon himself to clean out the winter’s leavings said more about him than he chose to believe.

  Without being asked, Valerius shed his tunic and jumped into the trench. He lifted clear a charred hawthorn log and laid it to one side.

  When he was not expressly invited to leave, he said, “You have never asked for my opinion. But Luain mac Calma wishes me to be on Mona and so I am on Mona. If I am to stay here, I would rather not die in a pointless battle against men I once led.”

  “Because you still care for them?” Efnís did not spit, but might as well have done.

  Valerius paused for a moment, his cupped palms full of ash. Even in the poor light, his face was unusually bland. He said, “I do care for them, yes; they were good men. But more because I know how they are trained and what they can do and I know that, however great the courage of Braint’s warriors, however profound the dreaming you build, you cannot stop fifteen thousand trained infantry from marching over the whole of Mona and killing every living thing they meet. If you attempt it simply to prove me wrong, the deaths of your people will lie on your conscience. Their ghosts will wait for yours when the inquisitors finally let you die.”

  It was the first time he had been so plain. Efnís turned to stare at him. His eyes raked across the scars, new and old, on the other’s body as if they spoke a truth his words did not. “What would you have us do?” he asked.

  In the god-space of Valerius’ heart was the image that had rested there since Longinus had spoken his treachery: of dreamers and children on ships on a quiet sea. He had spoken of it to mac Calma, and urged him to act, and, instead, the Elder had taken ship at midwinter, when no sane man sailed, and had not come home. He had not, apparently, thought to share the vision with Efnís before he left.

  Valerius said, “I would beg, borrow and steal every ship that can hold more than five people and start evacuating the entire population of Mona to Hibernia.”

  “What?” Efnís’ laugh was lost in the vast space of the great-house. “Don’t be ridiculous. Where in Hibernia could be put six thousand people? What are we supposed to feed them? Where will they sleep?”

  They were standing at either end of the trench, with only white ash between them. Valerius leaned back and dusted the crumbs from his hands. “What will you feed them and where will they sleep when the legions have razed Mona to the ground? Start calling in merchant ships from Hibernia; they owe you their livelihood, they’ll come if you ask it. You can take the seed corn, the cattle, the in-lamb ewes you would have kept here. Hibernia has land to spare and you can produce more corn than you eat. You will be taking the full elder council of Mona, with two thousand dreamers, healers and singers and as many trained warriors as survive. For that, the Hibernians will welcome you as their brothers and sisters.”

  “What of the great-house? It has
stood since before the time of the ancestors. If we leave, it will be destroyed.”

  “Then it can be rebuilt after Rome has gone.”

  Valerius spoke the greatest sacrilege in the place of greatest sanctity and the gods did not strike him dumb. Efnís stared and opened his mouth and shut it again.

  Gently, Valerius said, “Efnís—think. Luain mac Calma isn’t here and you have people to protect. Paulinus is massing an army on the mainland that is almost as big as the one that invaded Britannia nearly twenty years ago. When they have taken the western mountains, they will commandeer every floating craft to make a way across the straits. You don’t have the luxury of time.”

  Pulling himself out of the pit, Valerius stepped round to Efnís’ side. The wall behind was alive with carvings of other ages. The newest was his, the outline of a hound with the wood still white beneath. His hound rarely showed itself fully on Mona; the carving carried the essence of it, so that his hands felt more alive if he touched it. To abandon it, to feel it burn in the legions’ conflagration, would hurt more than he cared to imagine.

  Efnís was still in the trench, his head lower than a child’s. Crouching down, so that their eyes were level and soul could meet soul, Valerius said gently, “It’s the elders who make the house great, not the wood or the thatch or even the carvings along the roof beams. I can carve another hound. I can’t teach the lore of Mona to a new generation of dreamers because I don’t know it. If you’re dead, and the great-house still stands, will the gods thank you for it, do you think?”

  They had been friends once, long ago, when the Eceni had been all of the world and Rome a name to frighten children. Beneath all the taints of betrayal and the vengeful dead, a thread remained to let Valerius read in Efnís’ eyes the moment when the impossible became not only possible, but unavoidable.

  It took longer for Efnís to acknowledge, and longer still for him to speak aloud. When he did, it was with the desperation of one cornered, who still has the power to hurt.

  “Braint will never agree to withdraw the warriors,” he said, at last. “She will die defending Mona and those who follow her will stand over her body until the last of them is cut down. They would have done the same for your sister. They still will, if the Boudica ever returns to take her place amongst them.”

  CHAPTER 30

  “BRAINT’S GONE. HER HORSE CAME BACK WITHOUT HER. We searched for her body all morning and couldn’t find it.”

  The news was delivered by the slinger who had led the ambush Valerius had watched. A blunt, broad-shouldered Siluran youth, he looked barely old enough to lift a spear and yet bore the scars of five years’ fighting. He stood on the jetty with the ferry rope still in his hand and only the teeth bitten hard into his lower lip kept him from weeping.

  Half a month had passed since the dawn raid on the cavalry horses and Valerius’ conversation with Efnís that had followed. In that time, the calm life of Mona had disintegrated into barely ordered chaos.

  Luain mac Calma had returned from Hibernia, bringing with him a small flotilla of fishing boats, as if Valerius’ suggested evacuation had been planned in detail since the autumn. The process of moving entire families, with their goods, horses, sheep and cattle, stretched the organizational powers of the elders beyond all sanity, but a third of the population had made the crossing and been welcomed by the Hibernians and the ships were sailing twice daily with full payloads to make safe the rest as fast as wind and water would allow.

  There was no guarantee that they would be in time. Spring had come early to the west, on the back of a warm westerly wind blown in off the sea that had scoured the snow from all but the highest peaks. Across the straits on the mainland, the meticulous preparations of Suetonius Paulinus, by Nero’s pleasure fifth governor of Britannia, were reaching a culmination, watched with increasing anxiety by the scouts.

  Most recently, two wings of auxiliary cavalry had made camp closer to the straits than any had dared come before. Spies reported that their orders were to flush out of the mountain passes all the warriors of Mona, and kill them. In the first, at least, they were succeeding.

  Luain mac Calma picked up a stone from the shore and sent it skipping across the choppy water of the strait. It bounced five times and sank. If the gods spoke in its movement, only he could read it. Grimacing, he turned to his left. “Valerius? What will they do with her?”

  “Take her to the inquisitors at the fortress, unless their orders are otherwise.”

  Valerius stared over the water and ran his fingers through the coarse pelt of his hound. The beast had returned as the first boats were leaving for Hibernia, as if it were required to witness the departure of the people from Mona. Whatever the reason for its return, Valerius had greeted it as he would have done Hail and revelled for a while in its company as a friend among the unfriendly. Still, it had brought also a sense of foreboding that he could not shake off.

  Walking with it openly at heel as the evacuations progressed, he had felt increasingly hollow, as he used to do in the days before battle. Because of it, he had been watching the strait for Braint’s homecoming and so had been first to see the warriors race down the slopes to the ferry and then first again to see that Braint’s horse was with them but carried no rider. What had surprised him most was that he cared.

  The sea ruffled under the breeze. The ferry jigged at its mooring, held fast by Sorcha, the ferrywoman, who had seen too many warriors ride out and not come back to let it touch her now. A wave of nausea hit the back of Valerius’ throat, and was not only premature seasickness. Over the winter, while his body had healed, mac Calma had taught Valerius how better to hear the many whispers of Nemain. He felt her touch now, in the closeness of the hound and the stillness of the day, but it was the sudden presence of Mithras in his mind that brought the sickness.

  To the young Siluran slinger, he said, “How was she taken, can you tell me exactly?”

  The boy fell gladly into talking, as if by speaking aloud he could rewrite the past. “A wing of cavalry was camped at the head of the long pass on the other side of the mountains there—” His arm waved behind to the taller peaks hidden in morning mist. “We were cutting loose their horses as we always do and Braint was on the hillside. She never gave the signal for the ambush so we didn’t attack. In any case, the horses we set loose were not the cavalry’s best. They had kept those hidden in their tents and mounted as soon as they heard the others run off. Even if Braint had given the signal we could not have attacked; they came through us too fast. Then she didn’t meet us at the hawthorns as she should have done and when we went to look for her, her horse was there but she was gone.”

  The boy pressed the heels of his hands together and stared at the them. He said, “They haven’t taken her anywhere yet. They rode straight back to the camp. Limarnos is watching. He’ll set fire to the heather as a signal if they leave and she is with them.”

  A watch fire would be seen equally by both sides, and be equally plain in its meaning. As if he were the commanding officer, and the boy a new recruit in need of encouragement, Valerius said, “That was well done. Which troop were the auxiliaries? Did you see a standard?”

  The youth was too young to know the details of Valerius’ treachery. He frowned and thought for a moment and then, “They were Thracian. The leader rode under the standard of the bull, like the mark of the ancestors, but painted in red on a grey ground, Mona’s colour.”

  “Thank you.” The mark had been Valerius’ once, and kept by Longinus. The war hound pressed against Valerius’ thigh and he laid his hand on its head for comfort.

  Before the pain of the following silence became too great, mac Calma said, quietly, “They were trained by the best, to be the best, that’s why Paulinus is using them now. Will they question Braint themselves?”

  Valerius looked up at the high peaks on the far side of the strait. After a while, he said, “Not unless they have changed beyond recognition since I led them. Longinus would never offer violence to a w
oman, except if she came at him in battle. In normal circumstances, they would take her back to the fortress for questioning by the inquisitors. If they have not done so yet, it is because they have orders to hold her here, where we might attempt a rescue.”

  “Good. I had hoped that might be the case. Thank you.”

  A second stone skipped across the water. It bounced nine times and the spray of its last dash floated high after it had sunk. Luain mac Calma, Elder of Mona, watched as Manannan’s white horses closed over the place where it had been.

  Slipping his hands in the folds of his cloak, he turned away from the water. His eyes sought Valerius’ and held them, and he was Nemain and Mithras together, and something deeper than both, with more pain.

  He said, “It seems we have a moment’s grace, a gift of the gods, in which to act. The governor must not find out about the evacuation of our people to Hibernia. It would be best if Braint could be returned to us whole and unhurt, but if that is not possible, better for her and for us that she not reach the fortress of the Twentieth alive. Valerius, will you take what warriors you need and see to it?”

  The choosing of the Warrior of Mona was a lengthy process, traditionally overseen by the full elder council. The position was not given on a whim to a man who had betrayed, slain and delivered into questioning more warriors and dreamers than he or anyone else chose to count.

  Nevertheless, Luain mac Calma was sworn Elder of Mona and his word was law. If he chose to give leadership of the warriors to a man who had once led the enemy cavalry, if he chose to make this man, in effect, Warrior-in-waiting without consultation or explanation, no other could gainsay him. That did not mean that the remaining spears, blades and slingers of Mona had to give such a man their trust or their care. Only the hope of returning Braint alive led them to accept Valerius’ command and that hope was far from certain.