by Manda Scott
Reaching into the back of the house, the dreamer brought forward three torches. One by one, she lit them from the fire. Dark became light and the scents of pine resin, herbs and tallow sharpened and became stronger, clearing the air, banishing the last traces of fear and desperation. Lythas caught Breaca’s eye and smiled again, a willing if weary conspirator. Across the fire, an agreement was in the making: he would return to find Caradoc and she with him. It only remained to convince Airmid and the other dreamers of the wisdom of it.
Airmid’s shadow fell between them, breaking the moment. She said, “Lythas, you have done all that was asked of you and more. If you are to guide us back to find Caradoc, we should leave you now to eat and rest and find strength for the journey. If you wait, Maroc will bring what is needed.”
He smiled gladly. “Thank you.”
Breaca stood, raised by relief. Where she had expected argument, there was the beginning of a plan. She would go north, there was no doubt of that; the only question was who could safely accompany her. “We can’t take Graine,” she said, voicing her first thought. “We’ll need to find a wet-nurse, someone who can care for her properly.”
Airmid said, “There is Sorcha, the ferrywoman. Her newest son is near weaning and her milk flows now as freely as it did when he was born. She would have Graine gladly and care for her as her own. Maroc and Luain mac Calma will take care of her other needs and her safety. Neither one would let her come to harm in our absence.” Because our absence may be permanent. If we go, we may never come back. And we will go, both of us together, because we must. “Will you come outside with me? If we’re going to leave by dawn, there are things we must do.”
They stepped out of the house of stone and earth into a world filled with dreamers. Luain mac Calma was there, who could have ruled Hibernia and chose instead the guardianship of Mona. With him was Maroc, the Elder, who had once been to Rome to see the enemy close at hand. They stood on either side of the door, naked to the waist as if for the slaughter of bullocks or swine. Each bore a hook-bladed knife with the back edge honed to razor sharpness. Behind them, two of the younger apprentices held ropes of twisted hide. Airmid nodded as the door-skin fell behind her. Maroc pushed it open and entered, smiling.
Breaca spun and was held fast. “Airmid? What is this?”
“He’s lying. It’s a trap. They mean to take you as they have taken Caradoc.” Airmid spoke in the voice not of the god, but of absolute certainty.
“How can you be sure?”
“Because that’s what I’m for, to be sure of these things. If you know how to look it’s clear. He’s well trained, but not well enough. If I were to guess, I would say Heffydd has had him for a while. He’s the only dreamer trained on Mona who would turn our knowledge against us. If you think back to when we first met the ferry, you will remember that Lythas was happy to meet your eye, but he would not meet mine, except right at the beginning when he was still in the boat and did not know who I was. You saw the fear that came straight afterwards but thought it was for you and the pain he brought, as he meant you to. He’s a clever man and not lacking in courage, but he is Cartimandua’s to the deepest part of his soul. If you go to her and plead for Caradoc’s life, she will give both of you to Rome.”
“You knew this from the start?”
“Yes. It’s why I didn’t bring him food. If he had eaten with us, the guest laws would have made it harder to do what we must.”
Dawn was near. In the impoverished light, Breaca looked into the eyes of the woman she had known for all her lifetime and did not recognize the dark in the soul who looked back. The bleakness of it shocked her. Such a look belonged on the battlefield, late in the day after the first fire of battle-rage had waned. It is a thing shared by those of both sides who have survived, who have killed and will go on killing, who have maimed and will maim again, who have seen enemy and friends die fast, or slowly, and are resigned to the same end. To Breaca’s certain knowledge, Airmid had been in battle only once, and the fact that she had lived through it at all was thanks to good fortune and the protection of the gods, not the dreamer’s skill with sword and shield. Combat was not her strength; healing, not death, was her province.
From the hut came the sound of a struggle and a breathless scream.
Breaca tried again to reach the door. “Let me do this,” she said. “It’s not your work.”
Airmid would not let her pass. “More my work than yours. The herb-smoke from the torches does half the job and you couldn’t stay in there for much longer. It was already affecting your judgement. And what we do here is not killing in war. You haven’t ever slain a warrior when the battle-heat wasn’t on you, and this is not a good time to start. You would carry the guilt and it would weaken you when we most need you whole for the ride north and whatever comes after. Go to Sorcha and tell her what Graine needs to be safe and happy. Whatever else must be done we will know by the time you return.”
“Then we’re still going north?”
“Yes, I believe so. Caradoc has been captured, that much would seem to be true, although I think it may be more recent than Lythas would have us believe. But the message was not sent by Venutios. What we must find is how best to get to him, knowing that Cartimandua expects us.”
“And what of Lythas afterwards? What will we do with him?”
Airmid shook her head. “There will be no Lythas afterwards. The carrion beasts will have what remains.”
Sorcha was awake in her cabin near the shore, feeding her son. Big and broad-boned, she lived for the sea. Her mother was Belgic, an escaped slave; her father the Hibernian seamaster who had given the woman both reason and means to abandon the home she had known for two decades. All of their seven children had been born at sea and six of them sailed it still. Sorcha was the youngest. Her choice to settle on land came late and for much the same reason as her mother had taken to the sea. Her man was a warrior and had died in a skirmish in the early summer. In his absence, she raised their three children in the company of the few others who were born and raised on Mona, and she manned the ferry across the straits as she had done every year since the legions’ invasion.
She met Breaca’s request to act as Graine’s wet-nurse with the same willingness with which she sailed. Motherhood came easily and she was already regretting the growing up of her infant. More deeply, she knew what it was to lose the light of her soul to the enemy, what it did to head and heart. She stood with her back to a wall, rocking her child in one arm, studying Breaca in much the same way as she studied the swell of the sea.
“Are you the right one to go for your man?” she asked. “If you see him, you’ll not hold back. If it’s both of you they want, that’s the way they’ll get you, using him.”
Breaca said, “Airmid will come. She won’t be so readily blinded.”
“No?” Sorcha’s hair was copper, her brows a shade paler, almost lost in the sun-worn freckles of her skin. She raised one of them now. “Unless they take you. Then I’d say she’ll be worse.”
“Maybe.” It was always there, hanging over everything. One took risks, daily, of death, captivity, torture, and prepared in heart and mind as much as one could. One could not do the same for the equal risks to those one loved; no such preparation was possible. Breaca thought of Caradoc and his last words on parting. I love you, never forget. For your freedom and that of our children, I will do anything and everything, to the ends of the earth. Her heart lay shattered in the cage of her chest and words did not mend it.
The cabin was built of green oak, pitted with knots. For a sharp, haunted mind that sought the patterns in everything, the whorls moved and resolved into bears and blades and crucified men. Breaca stared at the shifting shapes, lost in a past that was irretrievable and a future that could not be known.
Sorcha’s child fell asleep at the breast. With unhurried competence, the ferrywoman wrapped her son in a lambskin and laid him on the bracken in the high-sided bed with his siblings. A signal bell rang faintly, chiming over the murmur
of mother and children: the request from the mainland for the ferry. Sorcha raised a patch of blue-stained calf hide and looked through the peephole thus uncovered, which gave a direct view of the jetties at both sides of the strait. Pulling on a rope, she raised a signal that could be seen on the far side.
“That’s Ardacos. He’s there now with his bear-warriors. If he’s come this far, Gwyddhien and Braint won’t be far behind.” She turned back into the room, her jaw set bluntly. “So that’s five of you going, and not one whole if another is lost.”
“No.” Breaca took her turn at the peephole. With her eye to the knot, she said, “Love isn’t always a weakness.”
She believed it. First and last, more than care of the land or the gods or the desperate need not to see a people made slaves and lackeys to Rome, it was love that bound the inner circle that made her life whole. Ardacos had been her lover in the years before Caradoc and Airmid had been her first love, long before him. Ardacos was Braint’s lover now as Gwyddhien was Airmid’s and all four were sworn to the Boudica, to protect and to serve until death and beyond. The mesh and weave of given hearts was impossible to unravel, nor would any of them wish to try. Only a stranger would not be pulled into it and no stranger could ever be trusted with what came ahead.
The ferrywoman reached her cloak from its peg. Her wide, sea-raw fingers pinned it high on the right shoulder. At the door, having thought her words clear, she paused.
“Just remember, while you’re away, that there’s more lives depend on you living to fight on than that one man. It would be no honour to his memory to lose a land and its people because he is gone.”
The land of the Brigantes was grey. In the lowlands, grey mist leaked over barren grey rock. In the high mountains, which were never as high as the startling, snow-bright peaks of the west, thin grey slush rendered hard ground mud and made sodden the lying firewood so that, for the last two nights of a five-night journey, Breaca and those who rode with her ate raw the hares and small fish that Ardacos had hunted and slept in pairs sitting upright, sharing cloaks and the warmth of their bodies.
They were thirteen, the five whom Sorcha had identified, with two of Gwyddhien’s Silures to hold the horses ready within reach of the enemy and five of the bear-warriors, hand-picked for their skill in the hunt. The thirteenth was Tethis, a cousin of Ardacos’ just past her long-nights and not yet tested in battle. The reason for her coming had not been apparent when they set out, but Ardacos had brought her and no-one argued. On the fifth day, they learned why she had come.
Through the length of the journey, Breaca and those closest to her had considered the means by which they would locate and free Caradoc. Each of them had believed that he or she alone was capable of penetrating the vast encampment on the northern river where the Brigantes shared fires and food with three cohorts of the Fourteenth legion. A massed attack was impossible; the only possible route was by stealth, but the question remained as to who should go in and how they would best avoid capture. Breaca could not go. On that everyone was agreed; her height and her colouring were too well known by the enemy and there was no disguise in the world that would effectively conceal her when the Brigantes were expecting her to come. The others did not share her notoriety, but in truth each of them was known to the enemy and none could plausibly pass as either Roman or Brigante. Tethis had deferred to her elders and those with greater experience of battle, saying nothing until the morning of the fifth day when the whole group lay on a hillside within site of the camp and had not yet found a way to do what was needful. Then she showed what she could do.
She had been born and raised in the land of the Caledonii far to the north and had never yet set foot on a battlefield. No-one, Roman or Brigante, had ever seen her. Better than that, she had the small size and dark colouring of the ancestors so that, with a little planning, she could pass as one of the Brigante girl children, not yet come to adulthood. Dressed in only a thong-belted tunic with her legs streaked with mud and her hair flying free, she became yet another urchin underfoot, to be scolded and sent back to the fields, or, if close to the Roman encampments, put to work as a messenger, paid in tarnished copper coins and later lured into a tent for work that would not be paid.
From warrior to urchin, the transformation took place before them and it was clear even to Braint, who had been intent on something similar with far less chance of success, that Tethis was their best, if not their only, hope of reaching Caradoc. The arguments had been abandoned and the girl had left just before dawn, running down over the grey hillside to vanish into the river-mist that concealed the noisome chaos of the fort.
Throughout the long day, they waited, twelve battle-proven warriors, while a girl who had not yet won her spear walked alone among a thousand legionaries and three times that many enemy warriors. Tired, frustrated and eaten alive by impatience, Breaca lay on her cloak on a ledge of crumbling slate veiled by a swath of dying bracken that lipped over from the hillside above. Straight edges of rock dug into her flesh through the folds of wool, autumn insects crawled from the bracken to explore exposed patches of skin, ants laid a trail a hand’s breadth in front of her face. After a while, she began to pray for rain, simply for a change in the attacks on her person.
The rest of the group were no more comfortable. Below and to the right, Braint lay close to Ardacos, each on a similar slate outcrop. Others lay within hailing distance, making hare-nests in the damp bracken or lying out as Breaca did on the rocky outcrops that littered the landscape. One could choose soft lying and be wet, or remain dry but cold and hard. Either way, the day stretched each of them to the limits of their endurance.
There were ways to pass the time. Breaca counted the crows that flapped like thrown rags in the wind, tumbling down to the carrion feast of hanged warriors below. In the afternoon, when the wind backed to the east and rolled the stench of those bodies up the hillside to choke the hidden watchers, she began instead to count the dead, to separate and identify men from women, adult from child, blond hair from dark. They were not close and they had hung in the wind for many days so that she counted and re-counted and the numbers were never twice the same, but the effort kept her awake and alert while she waited, always, for the shouted challenge and the clash of weapons that would mean Tethis had failed.
“She’s coming.”
Ardacos had moved since the morning. He spoke from the bracken to Breaca’s left. A moment later, he raised his head so she could see him. He was naked but for a belt and a loin-flap of bearskin, his body lightly greased with goose fat against the cold. He edged closer, flowing like water over the rock, and, for a moment, the smell of him covered the stench of putrefaction rising from the valley. His face was lined and creased with four decades’ exposure to cold and biting wind. His smile was a rare thing, given as a gift, and she had learned to read it only after years in his closest company. As he gave it now, it was a preparation for disappointment.
“She’s halfway up and alone,” he said. “See … there.” He pointed further south than she had been looking. On the hillside, bracken shivered and was still. A hunting fox would have made such a movement, or a badger, caught abroad in daylight. Ardacos chittered like an angry stoat and was answered in kind.
Tethis ran the last few strides. She was alone and looked neither hopeful nor happy.
“I don’t care what she says. We will get him out.”
“No. He cannot be freed.”
“He can. It is only that we have not yet found the means. One of us should go in and look again at night when the guards are fewer.”
It was dusk. They had moved across to the other side of the hill, out of sight of the encampment and away from a wind that had come on suddenly and flung the bracken flat. The bear-warriors and Gwyddhien’s Silures stood watch in a full circle. The five and Tethis remained in the centre. The girl had brought dry firewood; its collection had been her reason to leave the camp. Ardacos had dug a fire pit and they burned the wood for warmth alone. None of them co
uld have stomached food.
An orange glow leaked up from the pit. By its light, they were all too pale, too worn. Breaca ground her knife on her whetstone, a rhythmic scratch and scrape that was lost on the wind. Without that much movement, she would have needed to walk, to squirm through the bracken, to run, to take her blade and attack single-handedly the series of guard posts that stood between her and the distant tent, now identified, where Caradoc was held.
She sat across the fire from Tethis. The girl was small, compact, collected and deeply moved by what she had seen. She chewed her lip, thinking what to say next. Ardacos asked a question in the northern tongue that none amongst the others understood and was answered cuttingly. Breaca recognized only the name of Cartimandua, spoken twice with heartfelt loathing. In the rest was surprise, vehement assent and flat certainty, but no hope.
At the end, they fell to a heavy silence until, choosing his words, Ardacos said, “She doesn’t want to tell you this because she’s afraid it’ll only add to your grief, but I think you have to know. The tent in which they hold Caradoc is set over an outcrop of rock. They have him chained to it by neck and ankles. The only way you could free him would be to take a smith along who had time to break the iron. Eight legionaries sleep in there, two awake at all times. They sit with him, talking, or watching him sleep. His every move—every one—is accompanied.” His eyes reflected more grief than Breaca had ever seen. He said, “I’m sorry. Tethis is right. There’s no way to get him out.”
“There must be. She just hasn’t found it. Ask her how she knows this.”
“I’ve already asked. She took him his meal. She spoke with him while he ate it.” Ardacos paused. His gaze met Airmid’s, Gwyddhien’s, Braint’s before it would meet hers. Whatever he saw there gave him the strength he needed to continue. Looking finally at her, he said, “Tethis offered him death. It was all she could give. She has a knife and could have used it on him—and then herself—before the legionaries could reach her. For him, and for you, she would have done this.”