Dreaming the Eagle (9 page)

‘You have been practising with your father’s new war spears again?’

‘Only for a short while. Macha needed help with the weeding. Afterwards, I took one out to the lower meadow and tried it for balance.’

‘Was it good?’

‘It will be good for Sinochos. He holds them further back. I would need a weight at the butt end to keep the tip up.’

‘Hmm. Move your arm … no, back, like that, to make this muscle bigger … does that hurt?’

‘A little.’ Breaca closed her eyes, seeking the spot on the top of her shoulder where the pain began.

‘I thought so. Here, do you feel that? You’ve torn it. You should talk to your father. Ask him to make a spear balanced for you. Is that better?’

‘Yes, thank you. He won’t make one. I’m too young. If it comes to war I won’t be allowed to fight.’

‘It won’t come to war this summer. The elders will meet at the midsummer gathering to review their decision but it is well known how you feel and if you speak against it nobody will gainsay you. If the Coritani were to attack, they might change their minds, but Gunovic has done his work well; the Brigantes are threatening them from the north and the warriors of the red kite are not so many that they can defend two borders at one time. They will not attack us if we do not attack them, so there will be peace for now. It may be different by next summer, but you will have your own blade by then as well as a spear.’

‘I might still be a child, and not allowed to fight.’

‘No. You will be a woman before the winter.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I can read it in the water.’

It was a joke. Airmid’s voice changed, deepening so that it thrummed through them both. Breaca opened her eyes and looked downwards. In the pool, their merged reflections shimmered. She watched as Airmid’s hands moved forward, sliding under her arms to lift the curve of her breasts. She frowned. A cold ache began inside her. ‘Is it so sure?’

‘I think so. You can’t stay a child for ever.’ The fingers worked gently, making her stomach swoon. ‘Does that hurt?’

‘No … Yes. A little. Only if you squeeze hard.’

‘But they feel sore more than they used to?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then it will be two months. Three at the most. You will come to your bleeding by the end of harvest, if not sooner.’

They were not joking now, not for this. It was too big to think of. Airmid’s hands linked in front of her, squeezing her diaphragm, warming the place where the fear grew. Breaca looked up at the sky. High overhead a kestrel hung on a thermal, a blurred smudge in blue air. Beside her, Airmid said, ‘Be happy. By this time next year, you will be free of the elder grandmother.’

‘Did you think that when you went out on your longnights?’

‘No. I was happy with her. I was sad to leave.’

‘I will be too.’

‘I know.’

The sun moved round and glanced up off the water, achingly bright. They slid off the rock and into the shade of the hazel and lay side by side, their arms stretched out together, dark skin and pale making alternating bands of colour. Breaca turned onto her stomach and drew patterns on Airmid’s arm, starting at the wrist and moving up the forearm. At the elbow, she stopped and traced the lines of an old tattoo. The pattern was fading a little with age but it had been carefully done, slightly larger than life, as if the god, in the shape of a frog, had dipped a hind foot in bluegreen ink and stepped on the inner fold of Airmid’s elbow where the mark of it would be closest to her heart. Breaca drew a loop around it with her finger. With care, because it was not done even for the closest of friends to probe too deeply into another’s dreaming, she said: ‘I have always wondered how the elder grandmother could do this without sight to guide her hand.’

‘She doesn’t need eyes to see the patterns of things. You know that.’

‘I do. But I thought she might have done it before, when you were a child and she could still see.’

‘No. I didn’t know about the frogs then. They didn’t come to me before my longnights. Nothing came before then. I thought I was barren, that I would be coming back with nothing. I used to lie awake praying to Nemain for a dream, any dream, even if it was one that barely touched me, like Camma’s. The elder grandmother told me once that she thought I might dream the earthworm and I believed her. I couldn’t sleep for nights afterwards, thinking how bad it would be.’

‘She told me I was a wasp, that I would sleep through the winter and sting people in the summer.’

‘She has her own reasons. I think the worrying is needed, to leave you open for the gods. But you will dream. You must believe it. It’s just hard to wait.’

‘I know. I have no patience. But it’s better when we talk about it.

It had been her utmost fear: that she was so close to becoming a woman and still the gods had sent no sign. It was good to hear that it had been the same for Airmid. The knot in her diaphragm relaxed a little. She sighed and shifted over on the rock, moving her hand on the other girl’s hip. A soft kiss brushed her neck. She leaned into it and let her fingers drift down, exploring. It was a day for new patterns, for exploring in the shifting shadows, for merging, sweat-glued, with another. The kisses became longer and more focused and their direction changed. At the pool, the kingfisher dived a second time, unwitnessed, and came up with a fish. High above, the kestrel slipped sideways over the water and began to hunt the rushes on the far bank. Across the river, in the horse paddocks, a boy and a hound whelp played with a leggy dun filly, taking turns to stalk imaginary monsters.

The sun moved on and the shadows made sharper angles. Breaca lay with a palm pressed to Airmid’s frog-print and thought of childhood and what it would be to leave it. A new thought came, one that brought back the cold, differently. She rolled over, moving out of the shade. It did not make the thought better. ‘Airmid … ?’

‘Yes?’

‘What if I don’t become a dreamer, and you are called to go to the dreamers’ school on Mona? Would you go without me?’

‘What?’

The older girl came upright, suddenly, frowning to make sense of the question. Looking her straight in the eye, Breaca said, ‘The training is twelve years, maybe twenty, if the elders ask it. Would you go without me?’

‘No, of course not, how could you say that?’ The frown was frozen on Airmid’s face. Her fingers, lacing through Breaca’s, squeezed until the knuckles were white. ‘It is not going to happen,’ she said. ‘Don’t talk of it. You will dream.’

‘But’

‘But even if I were called to Mona tomorrow, you could still come. Every dreamer must have a warrior as guardian and you are that already. You could come as my warrior and train in the warriors’ school.’

It was the core of her fear. Since the day of her mother’s death, since Airmid’s gift of the redquilled feather, the shadow of it had darkened everything. Breaca closed her eyes. The cold engulfed her. In the darkness of her own grief, she said, ‘On Mona, the warriors are nothing. They haven’t been to war since the time of Caesar. It is the dreamers who sit in the elder council.’ It was an overstatement, she knew; warriors who trained in the school on Mona were accorded the highest worth but that was not the point.

Airmid, understanding, did not correct her. Instead, she said, ‘The dreamers share their council with those born in the royal line of their people. You are the next leader of the Eceni. If I am called, there will be a place for you, too.’

It was not what she wanted. Breaca opened her eyes. Airmid sat opposite, her face serious. Sand stuck in a feathered line up the length of her arm, like the rib on a leaf. Her eyes were pools to drown in. Every part of her was beautiful. Breaca reached out and took both her hands. They had shared everything, the deepest part of living. It was right that she give her deepest secret. Here, by the gods’ pool with Airmid as witness, Breaca nic Graine, heir to the royal line of the Eceni, gave voice to her secret and made it an oath. ‘If I go to Mona, it will be because of who I am, not an accident of my birth or a single act with a spear. I will go as a dreamer, or I will not go at all.’

It was Airmid’s idea that they leave the pool and walk up the river to a place where they could swim. No-one was out in the noon heat to watch as they passed the last of the horse paddocks and walked north up the narrow ribbon of marginal land that joined the forest to the water. Away from the village, the land became rougher; good lush meadow gave way to harsher, coarser grasses and then to sand and scrub with the occasional ankle-sucking marsh. At these places, they skirted into the first ranks of trees, weaving out again as the ground rose and dried back to grassland. Upstream, the river was narrower than the stretch that sang past the roundhouse, but faster flowing so that the tune of it was different and the life it gathered more varied. They watched the reed beds for different kinds of lizards and counted dragonflies in three new colours. The forest became denser away from human settlement and the trees changed. Here, there was more pine and larch and silver birch, less hazel and willow. The hawthorn was ubiquitous, stippling the margins with the wind-tattered remnants of white flowers. Breaca picked some and threw them on the water in memory of her mother.

The sun was lower, casting the shadows over their left shoulders, when Airmid called a halt. The river, caught back by an ancient pinch in the landscape, had broadened out again to form a pool, shallower and wider than the one beneath their own waterfall. The forest grew close to the margin, with a short, steep bank stretching down from the roots of the nearest trees to the water. Airmid put her back to the sun and looked left and then right. Taking a few steps forward, she did it again and was satisfied. Pointing up to where a tall beech stood proud of the first rank, she said, ‘This is the place. Go on up. Sit between the roots and tell me what you see.’

‘Are we not going to swim?’

‘Later. This is more important.’

The tree she had pointed out was older than most of those close to the steading. Breaca dug her fingers into the bank and climbed up to stand beside it. Roots the breadth of her arm arced up out of the loam and made a looping network that reached to her knees. Two of the thicker ones formed a fork facing the river and she squeezed herself between them so that they held her on either side, comfortably, as her father’s arms had done when she was younger. She looked down at the river. From this height, she could see through the shining surface and into the lazy, swirling circles of the current as it spread out to form the pool. The beauty of it was perfect, well worth the heat of the journey. She smiled down at Airmid. ‘Is this right?’

‘If you feel it so.’ The older girl stood at the very edge of the water with her feet braced and her hand shading her eyes from the light. She was serious now, quite different from earlier. ‘Look across the river to the land beyond,’ she said. ‘What do you see?’

Breaca looked. The tree held her facing east, to where the land was flattest. Out on the fen, the sun played tricks. The far horizon was lost in a haze that promised water but did not deliver. Between here and there, the land was flat, stippled intermittently by strips of stunted, wind-angled gorse and swathes of bracken and wild grass. None of it was exceptional. She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. What am I supposed to see?’

‘You’ll know it when you see it.’ Airmid grabbed a root and swung herself up. She knelt, putting her eyes level with Breaca’s, and gazed out in the same direction. Then she did it again, with her head further down. ‘You can’t see it like that,’ she said. ‘Sit lower.’

Breaca edged herself downwards. The horizon line rose and the angle of it altered. She peered at the place where land and sky blurred together and, this time, she saw what she was meant to: a long, low mound that sat up just proud of the land around it. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘It’s an ancestor mound. They built them to honour their dead. The important thing is that, if you sit here at the right time, you can see the sun and the moon rise over the top of it. I think that would be good. If it mattered to see them.’

Airmid had moved to stand at the side of the tree. Her head was tilted slightly to one side and she was frowning, not at Breaca, but at herself, trying to get the words right. Amongst the laws, some were more clear than others. One of the most clear was that a girl nearing her womanhood should find her own place to sit out her longnights alone, without help from her peers or her elders. Breaca had spent a good -part of the summer, that part not spent with Airmid, looking without success for a place that felt right. Now, cradled by the root-arms of the birch, she knew she had found it, and that she was not the first to sit there.

Airmid had fallen silent. Breaca reached for her hand and held it. The wealth of the gift she had been given sank into her, slowly. ‘I am thinking,’ she said carefully, ‘that this might be a good place to sit for the longnights of dreaming. That the ancestors might help one who was sitting here.’

Airmid nodded, solemnly. One half of her face lit into a smile, having offered her gift and knowing the worth of it. The other half was still serious, bearing the responsibilities of adulthood. ‘They might,’ she agreed. ‘Do you think you could find your way back here on your own?’

‘I think so. If I follow the line of the river, it would bring me back here.’ Breaca wanted badly to reach up and kiss her. Instead, she focused on the serious half of her face and thought it through, trying to see the pitfalls. ‘I will be walking at dawn, when the light is most difficult. If it has been raining then the place that was marshy today will be knee deep in mud. I would have to curve further into the trees and then back out to the river again.’

‘Good. You should come whenever you can. There is no knowing what weather and light the gods will send, so you must know it so that you can find it in fog and total darkness. For now, you should come down to the river and make your introductions. The water is shallow here, but it’s still deep enough to swim in. And very warm.’

It was. Their own pool, the one below the waterfall, was unknowably deep. It reached down to the realms of the gods and only the otters and kingfishers swam there. Here, in less sacred water, they could stand up to their necks, squeezing their toes in the eddying sand, and spit fountains at each other or dip beneath the surface and swim in bubbled spirals, sliding skin on skin like fish, or lie on their backs with feet and faces exposed, watching the world as the frogs do, blinking.