Dreaming the Hound (16 page)

Valerius passed through hills heading north, and then at a certain way-stone, remembered from past journeys, turned due east towards the sea. The track here lacked the strong curved surface of a Roman road, but it was solid and wide enough for two carts. White stones marked the waysides so that, as evening fell and the light waned, it might have been possible to push on through the night to the port.

Valerius had planned to do exactly that, but the scent of salt sea air met the sharper acid of the peat bogs and he remembered, with nauseating certainty, exactly how much he hated ocean travel. Without giving the matter much thought, he turned the bay cob to the side and pushed it out beyond the track to a flat, hard patch of ground where the burned-out embers of others’ fires and a small stack of firewood neatly cut said that the land and its people were hospitable.

The hides covering the cart could, at need, be stretched out beyond the tailgate. Supported on new-cut staves, they offered a measure of shelter from the persistent Hibernian rain. Valerius hobbled and watered the two horses, then lit a fire for the night just beyond the overhang of the hides.

It was far easier than it had been to lift Bellos down from the cart; no broth, however nourishing, can keep weight on a growing youth. Laid out straight on woollen cloaks, with straw padding beneath, he could easily have been newly dead after a long illness.

His hair was no longer the bright white-blond of the Belgae, but lankly dark, so that it hung about his face like wet straw. His limbs were thin sticks with folds of skin and angry bruises at elbows, hips and shoulders where his own weight had pressed on the shrinking flesh and made it bleed. In the last two days, the broth had come through as a thin, rancid scour that leaked from his guts as thinly as urine and scalded any skin left unsalved.

Valerius had never cared for an infant; the dead slave-boy, Iccius, had been his own age when he had nursed him through the insults of beatings and gelding and the use of men. Bellos was older than that, but his incapacity was greater than Iccius’ had been, except at its worst, and it lasted far longer.

Valerius found himself nursemaid, who had never considered fatherhood. Before he ate, or made his own bed for the night, he stripped the boy in stages and washed him clean with water warmed from the fire, then clothed him again with padding built around the sore points and an ointment of goose grease and haws and a flavouring of honey smoothed all down his thighs to keep the diarrhoea from destroying his skin.

All the way through, he talked to the boy as if he were listening, sending his voice out into the night.

‘Goose grease because it’s lighter than pork fat, but binds well to the skin. The haws are for suppleness and to keep the lice away. Honey for healing, but then you know that. I saw you give it to Finbar’s ewe when she had a hard lambing. The bay cob went well today. I think they gelded him the night you were kicked and broke him to harness the day after. He’d be better as a riding horse. If your mare was of a strength to pull the cart, I’d let him out and put her in the shafts. Be glad she’s not. She would never forgive either of us for the shame. As you may not, when you come out of this and find out how you’ve been.’

At a certain point, when the cob and the red mare had both shifted in the hobbles, Valerius laid aside the goose grease and lifted his sword. It was not the Roman cavalry blade with which he

had fought for nearly fifteen years, nor the long-sword of his ancestors, but something in between, fashioned to fit his own hand and his own weight and used in practice daily, privately, as a man might who keeps an oath which has no meaning save in its own fulfilment. He continued to speak in the language of the Belgae, coarsening it to the south and west, until it sounded more Gaulish and less Germanic. His voice echoed off the damp, resonant hides of the shelter and it was impossible to say exactly whence it came. ‘Of course, when we get you to Mona and the healers there know nothing more than goose grease and honey, it may be that you will not recover at all and I will have wasted the best part of a month on a journey with no reason. Luain mac Calma, doubtless, will pretend that he can dream his way to your soul and return it intact. If he is still alive, of course, which he might not be if he continues to— What exactly are you doing here? And don’t turn round; you would lose your nose, which might make the explaining harder.’

This last was in Hibernian, spoken with quiet certainty and far less emotion than his earlier slander of the dreamers.

Luain mac Calma, dressed in plain wool with no marks of rank or of dream, did exactly as he was told. Without moving any part of himself, he said evenly, ‘I came to find you, to warn you that there are Roman traders in the port and that you might not wish to meet them. One or two are ex-auxiliaries recently come from Gaul, where you are somewhat notorious amongst your erstwhile comrades-in-arms.’

‘And you, naturally, just happen to be in the port at the time I might want to have use of a ship?’

Valerius’ blade pressed forward, bridging the small space to mac Calma’s neck, so that it pricked the skin and a thin string of blood seeped into the wool of his tunic.

‘I’m a dreamer. I am, in fact, the elder dreamer of Mona. Would you like me to lie and agree that I am here by chance?’

‘I would never ask any man to lie.’ Valerius did not lift his blade away. ‘But equally, I prefer not to ask any question more than once. Perhaps I did not make myself clear. What is your concern with my welfare, and that of the boy?’

‘Bellos is dying. You were right in your assessment of me. I do, indeed, believe that I can heal him and, no, I will not limit myself to the use of goose grease and honeyed water.’

‘Why do you care?’

‘Because you do.’

The blade eased forward. The string of blood became a stream. Valerius said, ‘One more time, dreamer. Your life’s end is a leaning of weight away. Why are you here? What is it about me that you wish to entrap? And if you mention my parentage, you will die. I have killed more men than you have and in far harder circumstances than these.’

‘I know. I have watched you do it in the fire.’ With slow, deliberate precision, Luain mac Calma, elder dreamer of Mona, turned to his left, so that the sword’s tip scored a circle about his neck. When it reached the edges of the great vessels at his throat, such that to turn further would have cut into them, he stopped. The skin of his face was weathered with hours at sea in strong sun. His eyes took on the yellowed flare of the firelight, as a wildcat’s might.

With no hint of irony, or of fear, he said, ‘You are Macha’s son. To the best of my knowledge, you have never questioned that side of your lineage, nor should you - to even think it would dishonour your mother’s memory and, in any case, there are plenty of men and women still alive who were present at your birth and can attest to your origins. Until Airmid grew into her strength, Macha was the most powerful dreamer Mona - or Hibernia - had ever known. Had she chosen to stay in either land, she would have been an elder within five years. She chose instead to bear her son and her daughter in the lands of the Eceni, who were her people. Her daughter is dead - and in any case, Silla did not inherit from her mother any of her powers. Her son still lives. His people and hers have need of him.’

‘No.’

‘No?’ Mac Calma allowed his eyes to widen, in anger, or maybe scorn. ‘You deny the need? Or you turn down the request before you have heard its terms?’

‘I don’t need to hear its terms; you asked me once before. I will not come east to lead the spears of the Eceni in my mother’s name.’

‘I am not asking you to do that.’

‘Then what are you asking?’

‘That in exchange for the healing of Bellos - which will have to take place on Mona if it is to happen at all - I have your services, as a son to his father, for the time that it takes for him to recover.’

Luan mac Calma mentioned parentage for the second time and did not die although the possibility remained real for a long and delicate moment.

At the end of it, the blade in Valerius’ hand angled a little back, so that the tip no longer drew blood. Thoughtfully, warily, with a world of things unspoken, he asked, ‘Who defines the duration of a healing?’

Luain mac Calma did not smile, but the effort he made to prevent it was obvious. ‘I do. But I will not be over-greedy. The day Bellos can stand and lift his own sword and match you two strokes without dropping it, I will agree that he is healed and you are no longer bound to me.’

‘And if he dies before that happens?’

‘If he dies, then of course you are free.’

X.

WINTER WAS NOT OVERLY HARSH IN THE FIRST YEAR OF THE Boudica’s return to the Eceni but snow blocked the trading routes for four months and then the smaller tracks, until the steadings were isolated one from the other and she had seen, as ‘Tagos had said she would, why it was that her people lacked the heart for battle.

The elderly had died first, taken in the early months by cold or disease or starvation or a mix of all three. Eight were lost of those who had attended the covert gathering in the clearing; eight who had supported the Boudica’s return and were eight less to aid in the gathering of warriors, and in giving them heart.

For a while, that had seemed important, as if their loss might tip the balance of a strategy yet to be formed. Then the children had begun to perish, which was unheard of in the years before the invasion, and the middle-aged had followed, who should have been strong enough to survive any cold.

It was too close to the ancestor’s vision. Rome had taken in taxes that which might sustain the tribes, leaving the land gaunt, over hunted and over-grazed. The people were skeletally thin and if the children had wept tears of corn, their parents would have eaten them with gratitude. Each death made more urgent the need to raise an army and throw off the parasite of Rome. Each death lessened the heart of the people and undermined their willingness to fight.

By spring, as the snows began to clear, and the urgency and the impossibility matched each other equally, Breaca set aside the ceaseless circling of her mind and took her son and her hound and her spear and went hunting; it was the best and most concrete thing she could do.

‘Here!’

The body lay beneath a hand’s length of melting snow, blanketed as if under night-time hides with only the point of one elevated elbow sticking up to throw slanting shadows across the white. Stone found it and ploughed into the drift, baying. The noise soaked into the landscape and was gone.

‘Cunomar! Over here!’

Breaca dropped her game bag and turned off the track into the untested depths at the side. She sank up to her knees and the butt end of her hunting spear made a staff as she gouged a way forward. Encouraged, the big blue hound fell silent and began to bite the snow, hurling all of himself at it in a delirium of released frustration. His winter had been no less hard than hers, his joy at being outside no less expansive.

The drift was rotten at its core; the spring warmth was eating at its base even as Stone broke through the crust. He clawed out ragged clots of slush and hurled them backwards, making rain in the full sun.

Breaca leaned on her spear and let him play, watching the gradual uncovering of a man who might simply have been asleep, but that the rats and the crows had found him before the last blizzard so that his eyes were gone, and parts of his cheek laid open to the cold. He was well clothed; neither his cloak nor his tunic had been taken from him at a time when cold was the biggest killer and those who died were routinely stripped before their bodies were given to the gods. Nor had he been slain for his wealth; an armband in yellow Siluran gold lay frozen at an angle just above his elbow.

Stone whined and nudged the man’s face. Breaca laid a hand on the hound’s shoulder and eased him back. ‘Leave him. He’s past our help. This one was beyond help before he died.’

‘Who’s beyond— Oh …’

Cunomar had forged his own way through the drift. He arrived at her shoulder, breathing hard. The steam he made wreathed the air about them, blurring the crispness of the day. He had grown over winter so that the crown of his head reached beyond her shoulder and it was harder than it used to be to see his eyes.

He made to push past his mother and thought better of it, asking instead, ‘May I look?’

‘Of course.’

He knelt, touching the armband and the ravaged face and Breaca watched her son take in and consider the facts in ways he would not have done before. Of all her family, six months in Eceni lands had changed Cunomar most. He had grown in more than height since coming east; in his soul, he was calmer than the fretting youth who had followed his mother from coast to opposite coast, complaining all the way.

The ravages of winter had been part of it; no-one could watch the half-starved deaths of the cold and the sick and not be touched, but friendship had moulded him most and the pity was that no-one had seen the need sooner. On Mona, Cunomar had been the Boudica’s son who had been taken prisoner to Rome, who had stood in the shadow of his own crucifix, and had yet come back alive. He had found himself the subject of songs and of wide-eyed observation, but boys his own age went out to sit their long-nights and came back as men and none of them, before or after, called him friend.

The Eceni knew nothing of the Boudica’s son, save that he was an outsider, so it had come as no surprise when he had bonded with another the same. Eneit was a wiry, dark-haired youth, son to Lanis, the raven-dreamer who had so deftly steered the elders’ gathering to bring the Boudica back to her people. Eneit was old for his years - Lanis did not tolerate childishness in those around her - but he was unfailingly cheerful and harboured no grudges and Cunomar’s bad temper had bounced off him again and again until, of itself, it had begun to blunt.

Through the grim tedium of winter, Cunomar’s mellowing had been a spark of hope for which Breaca daily gave thanks. He was not yet his father, nor even Ardacos, whom he worshipped, but he carried enough of both, and some things only of himself, so that Breaca could see who he might become if the gods granted him time to grow.