Dreaming the Hound

by Manda Scott

  Two stanchions of oak had been erected, made of wood scavenged from the houses. Cunomar and Ardacos were tied to one, three of the she-bears to the other.

  Graine was not there. It was all that mattered.

  Breaca could look or not look. She could fight to contain the shaking, so that she might not appear afraid, or abandon the attempt, and stand white and wide-eyed. None of it was noticed, or made any difference.

  The procurator emerged from a tent that had been erected on the northern face of the steading and surveyed them with satisfaction. “I have news from Camulodunum that the wagons will leave with the timber by tomorrow’s dawn. They will be here by late morning, which gives us time to complete the inventories and the other preparations. There is the matter first of the king’s daughters, who must be attended to, and of the men, who have caused trouble in the night.”

  She had heard Cunomar’s shout and had failed to help him. In the litany of her failings, it was not the greatest, but by far not the least. The signs of it showed on the men, already stripped for flogging. Cunomar’s face was bloody where his ear had gone. Ardacos was bruised down the full length of his torso, but no worse than after battle. His eyes were swollen and blackened. He stared at Breaca through one and was trying to tell her something. She shook her head. I can’t hear. He grimaced and turned his face to the wood.

  “You are charged with insurrection, with murder of the following named legionaries …”

  This, then, was the trial. The procurator stood on a small podium of nailed planks. The cache of raw iron had been brought down from the smithy by the great-house and lay bundled at his feet. Breaca’s own blade was laid to the side, with Ardacos’ and Cygfa’s; to find them, the forge must have been destroyed.

  The procurator’s voice was a meaningless hum, joining the greater noise of the steading. Breaca watched a crow pick a straw from the torn thatch of the hut that she had shared with Airmid and fly with it to the lightning-struck oak in the lower horse paddocks. The Sun Hound had flayed his errant dreamers and hung them from oaks such as that. Only Rome needed to kill a tree to kill a man.

  “… or we could ask your daughter. The younger one. Would you prefer that?”

  Airmid was leaning on her shoulder, trying to bring her back to the present. The procurator’s mouth was moving and the sound reached her, and the meaning some time after.

  “Ask her what?” said Breaca. She looked about again. Graine was not there. The aching space where she should have been was empty and had not been filled.

  The procurator said, “Where is the army for whom this iron would have made the weapons?” He asked it slowly, spacing the words.

  Breaca looked at him. He was a clerk; he had no understanding of warfare. She said, “It doesn’t exist yet. The weather has not allowed it.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “No. If each of those bars were made to a blade, and each had a warrior to wield it, would we be standing here now? You have three centuries of men. We could have armed twice that many easily. If they were here, we would have done so. There is no army. Those who had already gathered will have dispersed to the north and safety, or back to their steadings. They will never gather again when we are gone.”

  “Indeed? Who would have led them?”

  “I would.” Cunomar answered before Breaca could. “I was the king’s son, given to the bear in the northern forests, the better to gather a war host in the south.”

  The procurator took some time to move his gaze from Breaca to her son. Even then, he stared past him, to Ardacos. “And this man, he is your father by blood?”

  “No. My father is in exile in Gaul.” Cunomar had come through the night better than the others, high-headed, kept ablaze by the arrogance of youth, or by the bear. She could hope so, while praying that pain and despair had not turned him back to who he had been.

  Breaca stared at him, much as Airmid had earlier stared at her, trying to speak into his mind. Cunomar, Cunomar, tell them nothing they could not find out by other means.

  Cunomar was not looking at her, but at the Coritani scout who stood amongst the mercenaries. His every glance was a challenge. He said, “When your governor has lost his war in the west, then my father will return and lead the warriors of Mona west to break open Camulodunum. Then the iron my mother has gathered will be made to blades and used by those with the honour and courage to use them.”

  “Your mother made these?” The procurator’s gaze switched back to Breaca. “You are a smith?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you made these. Of course, of course …” He kicked sideways at a bundle of spear-heads. They clattered to the ground, breaking free of the rawhide thong that bound them. “A woman of the Eceni who makes spears, and perhaps throws them.” Walking close, he took her chin and forced her to face him. “Was it you who killed the governor with your witch-spears?”

  No, Airmid did that. It is the dreamer who makes the warrior, not the reverse.

  Breaca said, “Yes.”

  The procurator gazed at her in appalled fascination. “You know the penalty for being a dreamer?”

  “It is much the same, I believe, as the penalty for insurrection.”

  “Almost. The rebel is flogged before hanging, the dreamer often not. You admit to both?”

  She was tired of the farce of the trial and all that went with it. She should have spat in his face again, or railed against his nation’s invasion of her land. Instead, wearily, she said, “Why deny it? I am what the gods made of me. It is under your laws, not theirs or mine, that I am guilty of wrong.”

  They flogged Cunomar, Ardacos, and the three she-bears who had each killed a mercenary. It was done thoroughly, by men who had been flogged many times themselves in their twenty-five years in the legions. It was not easy to witness, but not impossible.

  If Breaca watched the sun, and the crow that collected thatch straw in spite of the noise, if she gave attention to the trail of ants across the beaten earth of the steading, if she rested her mind in the net of the ancestor-torc, which was silent, as if waiting, then it was possible to bear witness, to honour the courage and not the pain. It was not necessarily worse than battle, and wounds taken now would hasten death later, which was not a bad thing.

  After a while, she gave her attention to Cygfa, who was shaking uncontrollably, and tried to think of something that might help. “They may be armed,” she said, quietly. “It may be possible to take a knife and turn it inwards.”

  With appalling certainty, Cygfa said, “They won’t be. They have done this before. They will take no risks.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  There was nothing to say then, but to watch the ground and the single file of marching ants and ask again of the silent ancestor why every part of her vision should be extinguished like this, when there had been so much to hope for.

  It ended, in time, because all sport ends, and there was more to come, which might be better entertainment.

  Then it was impossible to watch the ants, because Graine was there at last, dazed and silent and unsteady on her feet, pushed out of the hut that had been Airmid’s, where the crows drew straws from the thatch.

  The child had been cleaned, and fed, and had been sick, and that, too, had been cleaned, and someone, Briga maim them and hold them for ever in pain, had combed her hair and set a circlet of woven oak leaves about it, and a filament of gold about her neck, so that her beauty was beyond doubt, and her chastity.

  She was small and alone and terrified and beyond the ability to be brave. Her eyes sought her mother’s and found no comfort there. She opened her mouth to speak and shut it again. She was weeping, and had been so and would continue for ever and there was nothing that could be done.

  In her head, silently, over and over, Breaca said, Graine, I’m sorry, and heard the voice of her daughter, earnest and desperate, saying, It’s my fault. Dubornos fell asleep …

  Cygfa was cursing, rigidly, a long continuous hiss that called on all
that was darkest of Briga and Nemain to aid her and blight the men who came for her. They laughed, and hit her and closed her mouth with a rag. She did not have to look beautiful.

  Then the nightmare began, and it was impossible to witness it and remain sane.

  Near the beginning, Breaca was sick; a pathetic puking of bile and spit that retched her empty and inside out. No-one came to clean her. Airmid leaned on her one arm and Gunovar on her other and between them they kept her upright.

  Airmid said, “Don’t look,” and she did not look but it was impossible not to listen, not to hear the annihilation of Graine, the delicate, beautiful child who held the strings of her heart, and of Cygfa, who was Caradoc reborn as woman, and more vulnerable for it, as man after man of the procurator’s guard, by daylight and then by firelight, ensured beyond all possible doubt that neither was chaste and that their executions in the morning would not offend the Roman gods, or break the laws of Rome.

  Through it all, the torc remained silent and empty; the ancestor-dreamer offered no aid and could not be reached to ask for it, or Breaca would have done so, if only for herself. There was nothing, ever, that could be done to repair the destruction.

  Cunomar lay on his side in the bloodied dirt in the place where the mercenaries had left him, which may have been his own room, that he had once shared with Eneit and now shared with Ardacos and three of the she-bears.

  They had been kept there the night before and had scraped a latrine in the corner and used it, not expecting to come back. The stench mingled with the hammering pain of his head where his ear had once been and his back, which no longer bore skin, and his arms where the weight of hanging on the ties at the stanchion had pulled at his shoulders.

  There was no way to lie that did not send fire through his body, and so no way to sleep. He lay in the dark and felt Ardacos’ shoulder pressed on the heel of his foot; a steady presence that gave more comfort than words could do. The three she-bears lay about him, holding steady their breathing as he was steadying his. It was the best he could do; a final attempt not to crumble to weeping distraction, while in his head all he could hear was the inhuman croak of Graine screaming and screaming, and then not screaming, which was worse.

  All through his childhood, when he had envied his sister’s delicacy and beauty and the affection of their mother and her place in Airmid’s heart, and Sorcha’s, and her easy way with Stone and her growing power, Cunomar had never wished her dead. He did so now, passionately, for her sake. Lying on the cold floor with no feeling in his fingers where the ties had cut the blood from his wrists, and too much in his head, his arms and his back, he prayed to the nameless bear who lived within him that Graine’s silence meant she had found release in death.

  Later, colder, he wished the same for himself, and the others.

  Later still, shuddering uncontrollably and on the verge of weeping, he remembered what Ardacos had said before it started. Think of the bear-marking, and of what it made you. Then again, afterwards, as they were carried back to the hut. Think of the bear-marking. It was worse than this.

  It might have been worse, it was hard to remember. Pain passed is easily forgotten, except in the sense of triumph at having survived it. Certainly the bear-marking had gone on for longer; the flogging had lasted barely an afternoon while his time in the bear’s cave under the care of the elders of the Caledonii had lasted from dusk of the first day to dusk of the fourth and every moment between had been agony.

  He thought they had used heated flint blades to make the scars on his shoulders and back, but had never been sure. At the time, it had been too dark and he had been too lost, too locked into each breath, to care. Afterwards, it had been part of the magic and important not to know how it was done.

  Breathe. Dive into the breath. Let it carry you to the core of yourself, where your strength lies.

  The elders had said it, over and over, and time had warped so that it seemed he had taken days, months, years of fighting his body, of fighting not to scream, of fighting not to fight, but to lie still under the searing, cutting, nagging knives, before the words had made sense and he had begun to dive with each breath, deeper, further into the core of himself, to where he had found the wellspring of his own endurance.

  More, he had found within that place a gateway to the infinite. Beyond the pain were avenues that ran among the stars. There, Cunomar had walked with the spirits of the bear he had slain and the beaver that had been his first kill for the elders, and beyond them he had met the panoply of gods: Briga and Nemain, Camul the war god of the Trinovantes, and Belin, the sun. Each of them separately had given him a glimpse of what it was to be a dreamer.

  He had risen, bear-marked, with two gifts; the first and most palpable was the knowledge of the strength he bore at the core of himself. Beyond that, the gift that bore aloft his soul was the crack that had opened in the firmament and let him see through, as a dreamer sees, to a possible future.

  I wish to be a warrior to surpass my mother and my father, of a stature to lead the rout of Rome. In the presence of the bear-dancers of the Caledonii, Cunomar had spoken aloud the wish of his heart and the elders had sent him back to his people, full of hope and promise. Lying in the dirt and blood and sweat of his own failure, the irony of that, the hubris and the gods’ reckoning after, hit him, as suddenly and as hard as the veteran’s lash through the afternoon: a true dreamer would have seen what was coming and would have avoided it, or would at least know how to find again the crack between the worlds that let his soul walk through.

  That place still remained. If he could reach it, he might find sanity and a way to survive the morning, but to do that he had to find a way through the sound of Graine screaming herself hoarse that filled his head.

  He rolled over and lay on his stomach. Breathe. Dive into the breath. Let it carry you—

  “Drink. Drink and then wake. Come on. Drink, and wake. It was not so bad, and nothing to tomorrow …”

  The voice broke through the shell he was building and would not leave. It dragged him protesting back to pain and the memory of Graine’s voice. Cold splashed on his lips and into his gullet and he would have choked, but a cool hand sealed his mouth and a thumb ran down the side of his throat and he was silent and coughed hard through his nose.

  “Cunomar. Wake. Listen to me. You must wake …”

  He knew the voice, distantly. “Eneit?” No, Eneit was dead, given a clean death by his mother. He had understood it at the time and still hated her for it. Now, he hated the arrogance of who he had been.

  Not Eneit, then. A cold certainty made him open his eyes, and it was not, after all, too dark to see. The door to the hut was ajar and firelight played at the rim, bright enough to show the feathers in the hair of the Coritani hawk-scout bending over him, and the white scars of the fire-lizard branding crawling up his arm.

  Cunomar had forgotten what it was truly to hate, to immerse himself in the all-consuming passion of loathing. He remembered now. His hatred of the procurator, who was a weak man and had never known honour, was a ghosted marsh-flame compared to the burning inferno he felt for the traitor of the Coritani who had found Graine lost on the trackway outside the steading and delivered her alive to the procurator.

  Pushing himself to sitting, he said, “The mercenaries sang that you returned my sister to them for their pleasure. For that, I will wait for you for ever in the lands beyond life, and you will know no rest.” His voice was rusty. His breath was meant for other things. He coughed and had to wait until the pain had passed before he could be heard.

  The scout shook his head. “I went beyond honour. I’m sorry. I did not know they would … do what they did. The Coritani might spear a child taken in war, or cut her throat, but it would be done cleanly. Never … that.”

  Cunomar despised him, openly. “Why are you here?”

  “To tell you that. To apologize, so that you go to your death tomorrow and pass on afterwards and do not wait for me with hate in your heart in the lands b
eyond life. The Boudica and her son slew my father; that is well known and you have not denied it. Your deaths will avenge him, but I swear to you on my father’s life that I did not intend what happened to the child.”

  “Then get her free.”

  “I can’t. I have tried to see her, to give her the peace of death, but the procurator’s men are guarding her too closely and they have seen how I feel. I am not trusted any longer near either of the king’s daughters. I’m sorry. On my honour as one who bears the lizard brands, I have tried.”

  The scout made to rise. The bear god spoke clearly for once and Cunomar grabbed the man’s wrist, surprising them both. “Then try harder. Find Corvus, the prefect who greeted me in Camulodunum. He can’t stop them from hanging us, we killed the procurator’s men and must die for it, but he cares for Graine and could save her yet. He’s leading three cohorts west towards Mona. They can’t have marched far if they’ve left at all. Find him, tell him what’s happened. Bring him here.”

  There was a wait, and a changing tension in the arm that he held, then, “Perhaps. If there is a way it can be done, I may try.”

  The scout pushed back on his heels and upright. He thought for a moment, then said, “I have not told them the other name of your mother, nor will I.”

  They must not know she is the Boudica. Ardacos had said it, very early, and Cunomar had said, The hawk-scout knows. It is there to be read on his face. He’ll tell them.

  Against all expectation, he had not. Unwilling, Cunomar said, “Thank you,” and meant it.

  “There would have been no honour in telling it. What they do is enough.” The scout paused in the doorway. He said, “Your mother has honour. It shows, and the men of Rome are afraid of her for it. In the morning they will do to her as they have done to you. Don’t try to stop them. It will help her to die faster afterwards.”

  In the morning they will do to her as they have done to you. Don’t try to stop them.

  Cunomar could not have stopped them, and would not waste his pride trying, for her sake; only bear witness, as she had done, and do what he could to give her strength.