Dreaming the Hound

by Manda Scott

  The thought roused him early, so that he was ready when the guard came to the door, bringing slave chains from the wagons to bind them. He had not found the core of his own peace in the night after the hawk-scout had left, nor, he thought, had any of the others; the pain was too great, and the fear of what dawn would bring.

  Blinking and haggard, chained to Ardacos on one side and the she-bears on the other, he shuffled into the morning.

  And stopped.

  The timber wagons had arrived from Camulodunum. The post holes dug by the mercenaries had been filled.

  Six crosses ranged from east to west across the steading, for the family of the former king and those closest to them. A gibbet, heavy with ropes, awaited the she-bears.

  Cunomar was not sick, but one of the bear-warriors chained at his left retched violently, and he heard, and then smelled, a long, fluid fart as the guts of another gave way. He had only his experience in Rome to thank that he did not similarly disgrace himself. That same experience told him that he would do so eventually, and that by then he would no longer care.

  His mother was there. After the crosses, he saw her. She was fixed to the oak stanchion in the centre of the steading, where Cunomar had been tied the day before; dishonoured and alone in the place that should have given birth to her dream.

  She was still the Boudica; every line of her said so. More than anything else now, it mattered that the procurator not find out her identity, but it was hard to see how he could not when it shone from her so clearly: from the copper river of her hair, tied up by the legionaries in a parody of the warrior’s knot, to keep it from her back; from the battle scars that laced every part of her body; from the raging calm in her eyes, that despised the men who held her captive, and stood above them, and beyond.

  Cunomar felt the same twist in his heart he had felt when Eneit stood ready to die and knew without doubt that he loved her and was proud of her and it was too late to say so. He would have taken all the horror for her, but could not find a way to do that, or even to help her to do it herself.

  That was a new thought and it scared him as much as the crosses had done. Breaca had not been marked for the bear; her long-nights had been quieter and she had come home afterwards unscarred. For all her time in battle, leading the warriors or hunting alone amongst the mountains, Cunomar was not convinced that his mother knew how best to keep hold of her sanity in the face of what they would do to her.

  Breathe. He wanted to shout it and could not, because if he was deemed to help her, they would harm him, and that would make it worse for her. Dive with the breath, let it carry you inwards. Find the place inside that cannot be broken.

  She must have heard something, or felt it. Her forehead came away from the oak and her eyes rested on him and, for an astonishing, blissful moment, he was her son, the bear-dancer, whole and free, and she was the Boudica, given for ever to victory, and nothing could step between them; she loved him and he knew it, and she knew that he loved her and he could dive into the unquiet love of her soul and drown and be happy.

  A guard jerked the shackles at his wrists and pain lanced through his body so that he had to shut his eyes to stay on his feet. When he could look again, his mother’s gaze was gone, turned back into the oak and herself. The procurator had mounted his podium.

  “You are charged with being both a dreamer and an insurgent. Do you deny that you are both?”

  “No.” She lied to protect Airmid. It was the only gift she could give and they would still die together.

  “Good.” The procurator nodded to the leader of the mercenaries who stood behind her. “Begin.”

  CHAPTER 37

  THE HOUND WAS FIRST TO WARN VALERIUS OF THE STRANGER hidden on the margins of the coppice, and then the Crow-horse, less subtly.

  Valerius slid from the saddle and made a knot of the reins round the pommel of his saddle that they might not get underfoot.

  “Go on,” he said to Longinus, who had stopped. “Keep going until you get through the wood. If you reach the edge and I haven’t rejoined you, stop as if you’ve dropped something. Keep talking. If you can, make my voice, too.”

  Longinus was fit to ride by then, leading the pack horses. The wagon which had borne him from the battlefield was far behind, hidden in a thicket in the pleasant pretence that they might live to return one day and find it and have use of it again.

  Walking beside the Crow-horse, Valerius shrugged out of his mail shirt and hooked it with his helmet across his saddle-pack. His cloak was already there, slip-tied so he could reach it at need. They were travelling in the uniform of Roman scouts, with mail and helmet and the sky-blue shoulder cloaks. It was safer than travelling as warriors and as plausible as any cover. Amidst the anarchy of the western battles, they could quite easily have been sent east to Camulodunum with orders for whoever was acting governor. It was safe as long as they avoided any legionary patrols and they had seen none of those; the snow had not lifted long enough to let them forage freely out of their winter billets.

  The thicket was small, less than three spear casts long, of beech and birch and small, shrunken oaks. The trees were damp, hung with old rain and new cobwebs, only barely coming to life; birds gathered in them, but not the nests and young there should have been. Valerius sought for and found a deer track, which was wide enough to take him if he dropped to all fours and crawled. The hound led the way and he followed it, silently.

  The warrior waiting at the tree’s edge had heard the horses; it would have been impossible for him not to. Longinus did a good job of carrying on a conversation in two voices and four languages so that anyone listening would need to know Latin, Thracian, Gaulish and a smattering of Eceni to fit the flow of it together.

  The listener was young, dark-haired and dark-skinned, and armed with a hunting knife far beyond the legal length for anyone not employed directly by the legions. Three red kite feathers fluttering limply from his topknot marked him as a legionary scout and his belt was buckled with the medallion given to those who have excelled themselves; the eagle sparked gold in the weak morning sun.

  The youth moved from the rock behind which he had hidden, to a place at the edge of the thicket, whence he could see, but not be seen by, the men who rode along the path.

  A mail shirt hit the ground in a chiming slither of iron, shattering a flock of sparrows from the trees.

  “Damn it, Valerius. It’s gone into the thorn bush. Did you see where it went?”

  Longinus was querulous and slurred a little, as if not yet recovered from last night’s wine. He dismounted heavily and went in search of that which had fallen, catching his sword in the undergrowth and cursing in Thracian and Eceni.

  The scout shook his head at the weakness of the wine-sodden invaders, huffed through rigid nostrils and relaxed his stance.

  Valerius grabbed the thick lock of his hair and hauled back on it, kneed him in the small of the back and pushed him over, kneeling on his shoulder to trap his knife hand.

  It was too easy. The scouts who worked for the legions now were young and had not been born to war. Reaching round, Valerius slid the edge of his blade across the boy’s throat, enough to bring the blood leaking from the skin, but not from the great vessels that contained his life.

  “Breathe carefully,” he said, “if you wish to breathe at all.”

  Dark eyes glanced at him sideways, their rims white as a hunted doe. In Latin, the youth said, “I am a scout for the Twentieth legion, stationed at Camulodunum. I am seeking Corvus, prefect of the Twentieth—”

  Valerius shook his head. “Wrong guess,” he said softly, and leaned on the blade.

  “… Boudica …”

  The word was a hiss, in the face of dying. Flesh trembled under Valerius’ hand and it was hard not to kill out of instinct. Longinus was there. He put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Steady.”

  Both of those were not enough. What stayed his hand was the sight of the brooch pinned to the boy’s cloak: a serpent-spear cast in
silver, with three threads of blackened wool hanging from the lower loop.

  Biting his lip, Valerius eased back on the knife’s pressure. “That brooch,” he said. “Where did you get it?”

  “Boudica’s … daughter.” The scout’s windpipe was part severed. Blood foamed at the cut. “I … hold the life of … the Boudica’s child.”

  “How?”

  Dark eyes closed and opened again. “My life for hers. Your oath on it.” A whisper, sprayed red.

  Valerius laughed. He moved his knife up and back, to rest below the scout’s lip. Against corded, futile resistance, he pushed down with his other hand on the back of the boy’s head, forcing him slowly forward until the tip of his knife met the solid stop of bone. The youth groaned through tight teeth as the acolytes of Mithras used to do at their first branding.

  Blood pulsed freely onto the back of Valerius’ hand. “You haven’t been long with the legions, have you?” he said. “Information comes free to whomsoever holds the knife. I think we might have it without the oaths.”

  “No time …” The boy’s eyes grew wide at the centres. Astonishingly, a spark of humour lingered in their core. “I will die and she will die. Her death … will be worse.”

  He might have died then for the sheer effrontery of it, but the hound came to lick the blood from his lip and he saw it and jerked away as he had not done from the knife, terror naked on his face.

  Longinus said, quietly, “Valerius, he can see your hound.”

  “I noticed.” Valerius drew back his hand. His knife was level with the boy’s eye. It, too, was beyond the legal length and honed back at the blade, like the skinning knives of the dreamers, that they used to find the truth. The scout recognized that, too, and it scared him almost as much as the hound.

  Valerius said, “I will know if you lie to me. Do you believe that?”

  “Yes.”

  They made him sit and bound his hands and ankles. He was no longer bleeding from his throat, but his lower lip had swollen to the size of a slingstone where Valerius had cut it and the blood had pooled beneath the skin.

  Valerius crouched in front of him, holding the knife. “Talk to me.”

  Heron-clouds speared the sky, pushed by an easterly breeze.

  Breaca could not see them, only feel them, as if they reached down to her, with memories of the wind.

  Memories; nothing seen. It was a long time since she had seen anything but oak and lately not that. Darkness was better, although sweat stung her eyes and the light hurt when she blinked it away. That was a new kind of pain, a layer on the other layers, one that could be made better when the rest could not.

  Nothing made better the pain in her back, her shoulders, her arms. Breathing hurt and not breathing hurt and cursing and not cursing. She had not yet found if screaming made any difference, but would do so, soon. In the beginning, a small part of her had wanted to scream, to rage against the shock, the indignity, the stripping of her pride, but her pride was the greater part and had not allowed it. Now, the greater part of her needed release and only a small, waning kernel of something not yet broken kept her silent.

  Soon she would break, but not yet. Not yet. Not yet. The voice in her head, which had once been at least partly her own, was now entirely the ancestor-dreamer’s. It kept up the litany.

  Not yet. This is the beginning. The rest will be worse; don’t bring it sooner.

  She could not imagine worse. This much was more than she could bear. She opened her mouth and breathed in hot, sweating air and—

  Not yet.

  She closed her mouth and choked on sweat and old spit and somewhere, somebody laughed and she remembered that they could see her and for a moment, she took the weight on her legs, not her arms, and pressed her forehead to the oak and made the feel of it count against the stunning, blinding, nauseating, endless, endless, endless pain.

  A blaze of lightning struck her arms, above her head, and she forgot about her weight and slumped against the ties and the lightning struck her back again, adding pain to infinite pain and the oak was gone and all sense of safety and she opened her mouth and took a breath—

  Not yet.

  —and closed it again.

  Not yet. You have too much pride. You should listen to me.

  “I did listen to you. I came east to lead the war host as you told me. I am here now because of it.”

  The torc lay like an iron clamp on her neck. She had thought the procurator would take it; certainly he had fingered it, had estimated its value as she had: melted to gold it would pay a century of men for a summer of months, or a half-century for—

  That way out did not work any longer. The lightning strikes across her back did not allow it. The ancestor-dreamer stood by and watched.

  Breaca said, “Why did you lie to me? You promised a war host, and freedom.”

  No. I promised only that I would be with you, which I am, and that I would give you death if you asked it. Do you ask it?

  “No. Never.” It was good to rage at something other than the pain, however unreasonably. “You give nothing freely and I will not pay your price.”

  Not even to save the life of your daughter?

  There was darkness, and a blink of salted pain, and the lightning strikes and all of it was lost in the memory of Graine’s voice, and the silence when it had ended. Breaca said, “You did not come to me last night when I sought you.”

  And instead, I come to you now.

  “What do you offer?”

  The life of your child.

  “What do you ask?”

  What I have always asked, that you come to me shorn of your arrogance, that you abandon the walls you have built about yourself and see what there is to see behind them.

  “What point, when I am about to die?”

  Would you go ignorant to the lands beyond life, never knowing who you were born to? Would you—The pain pressed on her, driving her into darkness. It was difficult to hear anything clearly, even the voice in her head.

  The black became darker, muddier, the ancestor more urgent. Come to me, bringer of victory. Come. I am not so far away now.

  Come to me. Come to me. Come to … And breathe. Only breathe, because someone had emptied a bucket of water on her head and the cold was as shocking as the lightning strikes and it was all she could do to take a breath and open her mouth and—

  Not yet. Come to me. Follow the dark.

  There was no dark. Only the lightning, which was red, and the hurtful blink of an eye.

  Come to me. I am here to hold you. Only follow the dark.

  Something had to break; the small kernel of pride was too small to survive. Caught in the vortex of the lightning, broken by the agony in her arms, Breaca of the Eceni, bearer of the serpent-spear, let go of her pride and, for the sake of her daughter, followed the thread of a voice she did not trust into the dark.

  She was in a cave and the ancestor was in the cave with her and it was not the cave of rock and running water in the high mountains east of Mona, but a safe place, where the kernel of herself might shelter against assault and not break, at least for a while.

  Welcome. The ancestor was old beyond all imagining and the serpent of her dreaming lived within her. She was vast, and made herself small, that she might be approached without terror. Welcome. We could both wish you had come to me sooner.

  “I did not know how. And had not the need.”

  The laugh became part of her. You have had the need since you were a child, only that your pride would not allow it.

  At another time, she might have argued against that, but her pride had got in the way of too many things to catalogue and there was not time to list them now. Caught in the quiet cave, in a miracle of no-pain, or of a pain so entirely consuming that it had swamped her and she was already dying, she reached out to the ancient past.

  “What must I do?”

  Come to know who you are. What else is there anyone can do?

  Cunomar watched his mother lose consc
iousness the first time, and be made to feel again with the water, and then slump again soon after.

  He thought she might have died, and prayed for it, but the staggered rise and fall of her chest said that she had only gone for a time beyond reach and could be brought back again with more water. The mercenaries thought the same. One took the bucket to the horse trough and filled it and would have dashed it on her as he had before, but the procurator stepped forward and stayed his arm.

  “Stop. Enough. If she dies now …” He tapped his forefingers to his lips, thinking, then said, “Cut her down. Lie flat the crosses for the others. If she hears her daughters raised up she will wake. Bring them—”

  A horse, ridden hard, came up the trackway. Two horses; a second followed, with three others, so five altogether. It helped to count things, to keep his attention elsewhere; Cunomar was learning that.

  The first of the incomers swung through the gates, turning too tightly for safety. A normal horse, pulled round so hard, might have fallen. This one gathered itself on the turn and stopped where was needful, in front of the stanchion, missing by a hand’s breadth the fallen body of the woman lying limp on the ground.

  Cunomar gaped and closed his eyes and opened them and stared again. The horse was pied, the two colours of a frost-laden night. The rider bore the leather armour and blue cloak of a Roman messenger, with the oak leaf in gold pinned under his chin that said he came from the governor. He swept off his helmet and the hair beneath was black and the profile could have been Luain mac Calma’s made younger and harder and assailed more by life.

  Cunomar closed his mouth and swallowed, drily. His mind caught up late with his memories. Hoarsely, he said, “Valerius?”

  “What? Gods, it is.” Ardacos jerked in the shackles, sending a ripple down the line of men.

  Ardacos never showed surprise, or fear, or anger, or pride, or hate; until now when the loathing in his voice would have stripped a lesser man to the skin. “Traitor. He’s come to gloat.” He shouted it aloud. “Traitor!”