Dreaming the Hound (15 page)

The red cavalry mare, who was dying.

She stank of fear and defeat and the iron-blood of a battlefield death. Her breath came in great heaving gasps that shook the earth around her, and perhaps the whole land, from one ocean coast to the next, so that all of Hibernia and Mona beyond would know that the horse for whom the Elder, Luain mac Calma, had paid a year’s wages in gold to a duplicarius of the Batavian cavalry, had twisted her womb at the start of birthing, and would be dead by dawn, taking her unborn foal with her.

It was twenty years since Valerius had last seen a twist. His life had been simpler then, so that the most upsetting moment of his young life was when his mother, Macha, had taken her wedge pointed lump hammer to the head of a foaling mare, striking between the eyes to free her from life and pain together. Even as the mare had slipped into death, Macha had sliced open the heaving belly and released her foal, dragging it into daylight, sluggish but living, to feed and thrive on another mare. The filly born that day had grown to be dam to the Boudica’s grey battle mare, and the boy who grew to be Valerius had come to accept that his mother had been right.

The adult Valerius had used his own hammer on horses and on men, releasing each from life that had become intolerable. There

would be no effort in doing so again now and, knowing the mare, he did not believe her soul would wait for him as others did in the lands of the dead, seeking vengeance for a life cut short without cause.

Bellos, though, would certainly do so. His care for the mare had grown through the dark months of winter, the quiet romance of two strangers marooned without their consent on a foreign land. He had some facility for healing; given time and tuition, he might grow to that as a profession. In all probability, he had believed his friend would recognize him and would still her struggles as he lay in the peat behind her, striving to draw out her foal. For a boy raised in a brothel, he had a long way to go in learning the nature of pain and of love and how the first can override the second.

Valerius moved his hand down and checked again the erratic patter of life at Bellos’ throat. In the clouded mess of his thinking, another fact became clear to him.

‘If I kill her now, what will you live for, child? Would you return to life only for me? I don’t think so.’

The understanding of that hurt more than he had imagined. Smoothing the same errant strand of hair, Valerius said, ‘Bellos, if you’re listening, I’ll do what I can to keep your mare alive. If she dies, it will not be for want of trying.’

With the decision made, Valerius worked efficiently. If he were to attempt the impossible, Bellos had to be made safe first. The boy weighed more than it seemed from the slightness of his build, but it was easy enough to carry him into the single room of the smith’s bothy and lay him in bed with warmed stones around, wrapped in wool. He could not drink of his own will, but could be made to swallow mashed infusions of comfrey and plantain, boiled and cooled and kept in a stone jug for women too spent to eat after childbirth.

The mare had not moved when Valerius returned; she lay shuddering as she had since he first found her. Bellos could not hear him with waking ears, but there was no harm in talking to him as if he might listen from some other place. Conscious of a presence looking over his shoulder, Valerius said, ‘Watch now, and learn. We may save both of them yet.’

It was not easy work. He should have had two others to help, to turn the mare one way as he turned the womb the other. He considered walking down to the steading to wake one of the quiet, stolid women who knew as much of birthing as he had ever done. For Bellos, he would have sacrificed his pride, but the walk down and the waking and the walk back would have taken until morning and he did not believe the mare would live to see the dawn. Alone, then, Valerius fought and sweated and cursed and it was no different from being in battle, except that the mare was not actively trying to kill him, but only groaning in her turn, and straining to give birth to a foal which had no clear passage to freedom.

‘Please … turn with me now … just … turn.’

The mare heaved and kicked, striking backwards with both feet. The crush of her haunches drove Valerius’ face into the

sodden peat. His arm burned and chilled and burned again and an old wound at his shoulder screamed fresh pain. He braced his elbows against the earth and pushed with outstretched fingers and, finally, magically, the foal hovered on the brink of turning, then fell sluggishly over, opening the neck of the womb.

‘Thank you … thank you. Wait now, it’s not over yet. Let me think. Just give me time to think.’

He lay flat on the peat, heaving in air as the mare had done. He was weeping for no better reason than relief and an end to exertion. He wanted Bellos to know what he had achieved and what was yet to be done but could find no way to tell him. The boy had not returned miraculously to life, but equally, When Valerius ran up to the bothy to check, he had not yet left it.

Returning, Valerius lay down once again. He patted the mare Gently on the rump and spoke as he would have done to a birthing Woman, with only the barest of lies. ‘That’s the worst of it over. Let Me feel how the foal’s set and we’ll bring him out and you can rest.’

The foal: the white on black phantom that had stormed into his dreams one day in autumn and had come to inhabit them to the exclusion of everything else. Luain mac Calma, elder dreamer of Mona, had sown the seed with casual ease and it was hard not to believe the act deliberate. Airmid believes it will be a colt, black and white with a shield and a spear on its forehead.

Valerius had denied him, saying, That dream is long dead. At the time he had believed it. The truth had become apparent only later that night, and then other nights and then all nights and into the days so that he had to fight to keep his mind clear for the forging or the healing or the leatherwork or the simple making of meals for himself and a Belgic ex-slave-boy who had fallen in love with an aged cavalry mare and did not give more than a passing thought to the foal that she carried.

Bellos’ dreams were not Valerius’ dreams and the man had not explained to the boy the nature of the first true dream of his childhood in which he had ridden a black horse with a shield and spear in white on its forehead in a battle that defined the fate of his sister. Equally, they had not discussed the return of the dream with Luain mac Calma’s gift of the mare and the hopes that arose from it, too deeply hidden for Valerius to name.

Until now, when the foal, so long crushed in the womb, stretched a foot to Valerius’ searching hand and then, as if to prove itself alive, reached its muzzle forward and sucked on his finger.

It had been so long since he had been alone with a foaling mare, he had forgotten what it was to have new life at his fingertips, seeking to set itself on the earth. The foal nudged and nuzzled again and, with that small plea, that promise and prayer of later life, Valerius, who had thought himself immune to love, felt it again, with all the astonishing, annihilating force of the past.

As they had done in his youth, the doors to his heart fell open, So that the cold night became sharper, and the colours of the dark more dense. Weeping, he reached forward again, no longer tired, Bellos was only a small reason for bringing the foal to safety. There had never been any chance that the birth would be easy, but he had not imagined it impossible.

Through the darkness and into dawn, Valerius fought as he had only rarely fought before, for life instead of death. He could not have named the point when retreat became inevitable, nor the far later moment when he accepted it and stopped trying to proceed. The mare was spent and lay as if dead, with only the rise and fall of her breathing to show otherwise. The foal had long since stopped nursing at his fingers. He had felt its heart, once, in trying to draw forward a leg, but even that, it seemed, had faded.

Valerius sat back on his heels and tried to think. The mare was black down one side with peat, and lay quite still; to shudder required more effort than she could muster. The foal, if not dead, was close to it. In the recesses of his mind, Valerius heard his mother speak the invocation to Briga that precedes a death and watched as she lay on her side with a blade in one hand of a sharpness that could slice through rawhide, and cut the leg of a dead foal away from its body, and then the head and perhaps another leg, allowing the now-dead beast to be drawn out in small parts and the mare to live.

Valerius had foaled mares on his own for twenty years and had never yet needed to cut up the foal to bring it out. With his mind held carefully blank and his heart closed, he walked the short distance to the forge and back again and the knife that he held was as sharp as his mother’s had ever been.

Later, when the foal had been given in pieces to the crows, he returned with warmed water and some herbs and set about bringing the red mare back to life. Such a thing was not beyond him and the vengeful gods, who could give a man a reason to love and then remove it, did not see fit to include the mare in their retribution.

Near noon, with the mare dried and sitting upright, with oat straw packed along her flanks to hold her square, Valerius returned to the bothy and built up the fire until the room was as warm as it ever was and set about preparing a broth that an unconscious boy could swallow.

At no time did he allow himself to think of the crow-given carcass, which had been a colt, nor of the prophecy, spoken correctly, that it would be black and white with a shield and a spear on its forehead.

Airmid had always been the most careful of dreamers. She had never promised that the foal she so accurately described would be born alive.

The mare thrived on warm mashes and attention through day and night. She came to recognize Valerius, and welcome his ministrations. On the second day after her failed birthing, she rose to her feet and, free of the burden of the foal, walked across the

paddock and out through the open gate to the bothy’s door. Bellos still lay unconscious inside, but there was a change to his colour afterwards.

Thereafter, the mare ate the good hay that Valerius bought for her and drank the warmed water with the finger’s dip of honey and infusions of burdock and valerian. Given the freedom of the holding, she spent her time standing at the door to the bothy, blocking the sunlight and upsetting the hens that scratched dust baths on the threshold.

Bellos did not thrive. Three days after the foaling, when the boy showed no more signs of waking than he had done on the first night, Valerius admitted his own limits and walked down to the small coastal settlement that he had very carefully not made his home. There, he found the extent to which the strange, dark smith on the hill, with his strange, blond boy, had become a valued thread in the fabric of life.

Valerius had implied once that the Hibernians were all large and uncouth and that Bellos was not safe in their company. As with all falsehoods, the phantom of truth lay at its heart, but it was not the men or women of the settlement who wished ill on the boy. Any threat, if it existed at all, came from the seafarers who used the sheltered bay and clear springs as a port for clean water and bought meat and ale and were not always reliably sober, or safe.

Those with whom Valerius traded were not all tall and redheaded and none were uncouth. They had not come near his forge, nor offered help without its being asked, but still word had passed amongst them of the mare’s bad foaling and the kick to Bellos’ head. Their only question had been whether the smith had the skills to heal the boy and, if not, how long it might be before he must go for help, and where he might choose to seek it.

Opinion had been divided, but the weight of the betting said that he would go to Mona, to the lean dreamer who had brought the mare, rather than the Hibernian elders who held court around the hill of Tara. There was a deal of satisfaction amongst those who mattered most when the former view was found to be correct.

They were not direct people and Valerius’ conversation drifted, as courtesy demanded, to the welfare of those whom he had helped or healed or armed and clothed, and in the course of this it became apparent that there was a cart he might have that was newly covered with hides to keep the boy dry and that a newly gelded carthorse was fit and good for the journey and that there were hard-rinded goat’s cheeses already packed in the oat straw that would both keep the boy warm and feed the horse, and that a quantity of dried fish and mutton and fresh eggs and pitchers of

water had been packed elsewhere, because it had been found early that the smith, contrary to all appearances, drank neither the wine of the Latins nor the more wholesome ale of the tribes.

Last, because they really did value him and wished to see him return, a wiry, dark-haired girl gave him a small pot sealed with wax, with a bee inscribed on the flat surface. Honey was not common on the wild coast of Hibernia and what little was found was kept for healing, being worth rather more than its equivalent weight in gold.

Touched beyond telling, Valerius gave care of his forge to the same wiry, dark-haired girl who had shown some facility for both metalwork and healing. He gave his good riding horse to her father, who had recently recovered his cart with the hides of three cattle. He gave his supplies of dried leaves, tree barks and roots to the midwife and free use of his bothy to whomsoever amongst them might find need of it.

Mounted on the cart and moving, with Bellos packed in straw as tightly as the eggs and pitchers behind, Valerius promised to return with all speed to those who had become his people. In the moment of speaking, he believed it.

Bellos continued to sleep. Through four days of rutted travel, Valerius came to understand the limits of the amiable bay cob who drew his cart. The red mare, originally tied to the cart’s tail, followed the command of Valerius’ voice and, after a while, proved that she did not need to be tethered. Twice she led the way across spring-full streams when the gelding balked at the torrents. The cart proved sturdier than it looked and the wheels more strongly bound.