Dreaming the Serpent-Spear

by Manda Scott

  From the numbness of utter loss, he asked the favour of both of his gods to remain in this place that had been most recently given only to one of them. Mithras did not walk to him across the water with his hound at his heels as he had once done, but Valerius allowed himself to feel a sense of welcome, and carried it to those waiting outside.

  The way in was hard, and harder with Breaca, who was cool by then, and slippery with her own sweat. They carried her to the lake’s edge, where the brazier had settled to glowing coals and made the water a sheet of lost blood. The blushing scarlet gave her colour, so that she looked almost well, as if she slept in the wake of battle and might rise again, and fight again and this time win.

  So that she might be warm and comfortable, they made a bed of folded cloaks and a pillow from the sheepskin saddle pad from Graine’s pony. They set Stone alongside her and he had life enough left for his warmth to reach her. Airmid sat by her head, Bellos by her feet, Valerius held one side and Cygfa the other. Graine sat near the brazier, silent and white. Hawk kept vigil near the entrance, and left after a while, to leave signs for Cunomar and Ardacos, in case they should survive and should track them this far.

  He came back and nothing had changed but that more blood had seeped from the wound in Breaca’s side, staining the pale blue of her cloak. He took his place again in silence.

  Then there was nothing to do but wait.

  “Graine?”

  The voice was a sigh on the wind, althought it was easy to hear her mother within it. No-one else heard it, or they had the sense to know it a product of the tumbling air within the cave, or they were simply too focused now on the death that was coming.

  Graine did not know how to call the gods as they were needed now. She had watched Airmid from the beginning. The tall dreamer had called Nemain so close that she and the god were one, and still she was beyond weeping. Bellos was watching Briga as if he alone might keep her at bay. Valerius had not yet called his gods, as if to do so in this place was sacrilege, or an admission of defeat. Hawk had called on no-one, only asked whosoever might listen for a miracle, and did not expect it given.

  “Graine!”

  Sharper now, and louder. No-one else moved. Graine touched the back of her hand to the brazier to make sure she was awake. The burn made her swear. The blister began to swell even as she sucked it. Without asking permission of those who sat with her mother, she took up one of the beeswax candles and went to find the voice.

  She sought darkness, away from the flowing blood of the brazier. At the back of the cave was a torn gap around an altar carved from the living rock. The wind did not settle there. She turned away from it, towards the blank wall, and found that her candle sent light into a sucking space from which no reflection came back.

  The entrance to the inner cave, when she found it, was narrow and reached to the roof. She passed through it sideways and stood in a blackness so profound she might have lost her sight and become blind as Bellos, except that she could see the uncertain light of the candle, and so herself.

  The wind snuffed the candle out. She felt a pressure, and a testing and was not unwelcome.

  “Graine. Come.” It was a kind wind, or she chose to believe it so. She walked forward with her hands stretched out.

  Presently, she felt a wall and turned to her left and walked with her shoulder against it, so that when it bent again the other way, as the waves of a snake, she was able to follow, slowly, in case the ground fell away.

  She saw the light then, a grey feathering in the absolute black. As dawn that comes soon after midnight, her eyes feasted on it, taking in fine ridges in the rock, and the wear on the floor, as from the passing of many thousand feet over many hundreds of generations.

  She followed the grey, then, round another sinuous curve; and stopped.

  The kind wind smoothed her face. The grey rock was steady behind her. Ahead, a vent in the towering roof let in the late evening light. To either side of that vent, down the steep, arched angles of the roof, the rock was not grey, but the colour of late winter ice, streaked and cracked and imperfect, but still sharp-edged as knife blades so that the million facets took the faint light and bounced it forward and back and out and down and made of the grey a rainbow of monochrome shades.

  There was light enough to see the extent of the new chamber, to walk across it and find the place where a fire, or many fires, had once scorched the plain stone of the floor and sent smoke to streak the flawed brilliance of the roof; to scramble up on a rock bench and find the place where the wall folded in on itself to make a bed, and so to find the remains of the body that had been left to lie there, so long ago that the flesh had melted and the skin had dried onto the bones and the torc that had once lain so cleanly round the throat had fallen askew and was twisting the neck and the great blade that had kept guard for so long had dipped down between the arched bones of the pelvis.

  On a day of so much grief, that seemed too much. She reached for the end-loops of the torc to straighten the thing, and let the dead lie in better order.

  “Graine?”

  The voice was very clearly not the wind. She turned fast, as if caught in some wrong doing; and stopped again, for a second time, frozen.

  Her mother was there.

  The world broke apart, and was remade, perfect. Graine sagged against the stone. Relief flooded over her in scalding waves that left her damp and shivering with slick skin and hair that pricked on her scalp. “You’re better,” she said. Her voice came out as a whisper.

  Her mother opened her arms and Graine came to them, and it was as it had been, before the procurator came with his veterans and his endless harm. Here was a haven of warmth and comfort and strength and the heartbeat of a warrior who could take on Rome and beat the legions back into the ocean and free the land for ever for the gods and the people. Before all of that, she was Breaca, daughter of one Graine who was dead, mother to this Graine, who was so very alive.

  She sat now near the place where the fire had been, and seemed a little tired, but not more than anyone who has spent all day in battle and has not slept for two nights before. She pressed her lips to Graine’s head and blew a long lungful of breath so that the perfect heat of it passed down through her crown to the soles of her feet, shivering. Graine reached up, and took a handful of fox-red hair that was still rough with dried sweat. She combed it, gently, with her fingers.

  Her mother said, “Did you find the torc? The one in the stone chamber?”

  “Yes. I didn’t move it, though. I was going to, but I didn’t.”

  “You should. It’s yours. You can take it now.”

  “But—”

  Don’t argue now, child. There isn’t time.

  Graine looked up. The elder grandmother was there, brisk and sharp as she had ever been. Her eyes gleamed like a hawk’s in the strange light. She smiled, which was never a comfortable thing.

  Take the torc. You’ll need it. The other can be left here after.

  “The other…?” There was only one torc, which was her mother’s. Graine looked at the elder grandmother, who smiled as if she had done something particularly clever, and nodded.

  And so she knew, and the world was not perfect, but broken beyond all hope.

  She fell back against the wall, and reached for her mother, who was not truly there. “I’m not ready,” she whispered, “I’m too young. The elder grandmother came to you like this on your long-nights, after she was dead. I’m not old enough for that, you can’t leave me, you can’t…”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t, there’s too much to do, but I can’t stay. All I can do is leave you a gift, and the torc is it. Will you take it now, while I’m here?”

  “What about yours? And the blade lying on the bones in the stone cleft?”

  “The blade in the stone is for Hawk, to have in exchange for Eburovic’s blade, which must be left here with me. You do understand that? I am to lie here in the place of the ancestors, with the bear-blade and the torc of th
e Ecini. Tell Airmid. She’ll know what to do.”

  “How can you leave her? She loves you.”

  “Unfair, light of my soul, unfair…” He mother leaned over and kissed her. The breath did not reach to her scalp, still less to her feet. She sounded sad, but not bereft, as she should have done. “I will wait for her, as we all do, on the river’s far bank. She knows that, too. I will wait for you, also, and for your children and your children’s children; I will be their strength to the ends of the earth and the four winds; tell them that as they are growing so that they might always remember. But for now, I must go. Will you take up the torc? Please? I would see you have it before I leave.”

  If Graine could have slowed time by standing with the torc untaken, she would have stood for the rest of her life and beyond. Already, others were gathering; the ancestor-dreamer was there, and Macha, who had sent Valerius to her in the dream, and her grandfather, whose blade she had touched and so had brought ruin to her mother, and a man she did not know, with blazing yellow hair and the sign of the Sun Hound on his signet ring. When she saw Dubornos, standing near with the crows of Briga on either side, she knew she could not wait longer.

  The ancestor’s torc was narrower than her mother’s, and had white gold in the nine-wired weaving alongside the rich Siluran red. It settled on her own neck as if moulded for it, with the open end-pieces hanging solidly over her collar bones. She took her hands away, and waited for the world to become void, as it had when she wore her mother’s torc.

  Nothing happened. She was disappointed, and surprised. Then she felt the light press of her mother’s lips and the breath reached again through her crown to her toes. The light of the cave became richer and the ghosts within it more solid. The elder grandmother tipped her head to one side and eyed her critically.

  A lot of learning still unlearned, for one so gifted. Do not begin to think you have the answers. If you ever do, hubris will kill you.

  She wanted to say she would not care what killed her if she could join her mother, but Breaca was there, kneeling in front, taking the silver feather from her own neck and fastening it to Graine’s, looped across the two end-rings so that it balanced between. “The feather is my gift alone, not from the lineage or the gods or the past. Tell Airmid I said so. She’ll make it happen.”

  Breaca stepped back. The other ghosts had gone, except Dubornos, who waited, and the shade of a god, of all gods, that waited with him.

  “You should go back now,” she said. “You are all of the future, and all of the past. Live for that, and never forget that I love you,” and was gone.

  EPILOGUE

  Of all those who could have come, it was Valerius who followed her to the river’s edge; she was surprised about that.

  “Airmid is holding Longinus,” he said, by way of explanation. “Madb and Huw found him lying on the field, and brought him as they fled. He may follow you yet, but not if we can hold him with us awhile longer.” He smiled the wry, familiar smile. “It would be very hard to lose you both in the same battle.”

  I am not lost.

  “No. I have walked with the dead long enough to know that. But I will grieve none the less. And wake and know the pain of a day without you. The world is made lesser by your passing.”

  You can make it better, if you try.

  “We can’t defeat Rome. The spirit of the war host is broken. There is no Boudica now, to hold it together.”

  And will not be for years and generations. We were privileged to see the last of the daylight; now we are at dusk, in a time of mourning, the onset of winter before the next spring. Night follows day and there is cold and grief in the darkness, but there will be dawn again, when Rome is gone, and all that follows from it.

  “I won’t be alive then, or our children, or our children’s children.”

  No, but you can set the seeds for what can grow when the night lifts and the sunrise brings hope. The gods know nothing of time. They will be here, when those who need them come again, but to reach them again, the children must know what they have been, and what they can be. That is the task for now: to make sure the seed lies ready for the daylight.

  The river lay broad in front of her, and the stepping stones, and the welcome on the far bank. She saw Dubornos there, and the crows that would guard her passage over.

  Bán, I must go. He did not flinch at the name. She said, Call your daughter Bán if you would not keep the name to yourself. It is as good for a girl and a woman as a boy and a man. She leaned in and kissed him and said his other name. For the first time, it did not stick in her throat. Valerius, you must go back, and find what it is to live with both of your souls in balance, holding the two gods within you. That is the gift of all you have been.

  “I know.” He was weeping, silently. His tears fed the river, and made it fast and beautiful and safe, that kept the lands of life separate from the lands of the dead.

  She felt the brush of his caress as he left her, and returned it.

  The river called her, and the land beyond it.

  “Breaca?”

  The voice was one she knew, and had known, and would always know. She turned, and Airmid was there, at the end, a singular presence, indistinguishable now from Nemain as she herself was indistinguishable from Briga, who had guided her life.

  They met in a place where time had no meaning. She said, I will wait for you. I always have, through all the lifetimes.

  Airmid’s smile was the radiance of the moon. “Sometimes I have waited for you, and will do again. I will be there when you call me.”

  They parted, in no-time, and she stepped out across the first stone.

  Her mother was there, and her father, and Stone came, young again and joyful, and brought Hail, the hound she had loved first, and an old grey battle mare, and she saw, finally, what she had not seen when Dubornos stepped off the last stone; that the land beyond was the land of her heart, open, untouched, unsullied by human endeavour, and that the gods waited there, those she had followed and those she had not, offering the gift of their care, equally.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  There is very little left to say now, at the end.

  This final part of the Boudica’s story is the simplest and the best known. It is almost the only episode of early British history with corroborative archaeological evidence: Colchester, Chelmsford, London, St Albans and a host of smaller towns did all burn to the ground some time in the first century AD.

  The detail of how and why and in what order comes from Tacitus and is as plausible as the rest of his writing, which is to say it seems likely that the base facts are correct, if one allows for the hyperbole of the victors’ side.

  I have deviated from the customary accepted reading of his account in a few places. Most notably, I have the IXth legion march straight down Peddar’s Way in their effort to relieve Colchester. There seems reasonable evidence that the Wash did not extend as far inland as it does now and this was therefore by far the most direct route.

  Beyond that, I have the Boudica’s forces divide to assault Lugdunum and Verulamium (London and St Albans) rather than looping back on themselves simply because it seems to make geographical sense. More controversially, I have set the final battle rather further west than is the currently accepted location of Mancetter, near Leicester.

  Of all the myths and suppositions surrounding the Boudica, it would seem to me highly unlikely that tens of thousands of warriors did meet ten thousand legionaries in the particular valley the historians have identified; if they had, the metal detectors would have recovered at least a belt buckle or a harness mount by now.

  Finally, I have given the Boudica an ending in war as befitted her spirit; neither the poison of Tacitus—the standard means by which a good Roman matron might take her life—nor the “illness” of Dio Cassius were worthy of her, nor did they seem particularly plausible.

  The other characters are largely fictional, although the two Roman commanders bear mention.

  Petillius Cerialis
, the impetuous legate of the IXth legion, did, apparently, survive an almost total annihilation of his forces and escape with his standards and a small company of his cavalry to take refuge in his fortress. He later became governor of Britannia, which suggests his action was not condemned in Rome.

  Suetonius Paulinus’ actions as governor are more or less as described: he was in the process of assaulting Mona when he heard news of the revolt. He took ship south and rode inland to view the situation in London, decided it was hopeless and rode away again, leaving the population to face the Boudican war host undefended.

  In the wake of the revolt, he scoured the land in apparent vengeance. Nero finally recalled him on the grounds that he was treating the natives too harshly, and installed a more moderate governor, Turpilianus, who dealt with the remaining tribal leaders by more diplomatic methods—or as Tacitus would have it, “veiled [his] tame inaction under the honourable name of peace.”

  On the native side, Dubornos’ fictional life and death are based on the discovery in a bog of the corpse of a young man described as a “druid prince.” He had undergone the threefold death of a blow to the head, strangulation by a cord and drowning in the peat bog. He was naked, but for a band of fox fur round his upper arm. He was well fed and fit and had the remains of a burned bannock in his stomach.

  All of these have led archaeologists to assume that he was a sacrifice to the gods of the place and time. Our culture tends to deride that but it has always seemed to me that the willing gift of a life, to take a message directly across the river to the lands of the dead, provided no-one else is harmed in the process of sacrifice, is quite different from the mindless slaughter of beasts or of unwilling victims and is not necessarily something to abhor.

  The writing of this series has been an extraordinary personal odyssey in which almost every aspect of my life has changed, almost all of it attributable to the deepening dreaming brought about by the Boudica and all who surround her. I doubt very much if the characters who inhabit my dreaming will choose to leave quietly and already they are knocking at other doors in other ways. If life and times permit, I will look back first at the pre-history to this series in Alexandria and on Mona and then forward a little towards Rome in the aftermath of the revolt and then forward further to the end of Rome in Britain. Those readers who are already familiar with the Arthurian legends will have seen the seeds of something similar threaded through the narrative since the first book of this series. I have no idea where that might lead, but it would be interesting to find out.