Dreaming the Hound (25 page)

‘I might go deaf as well?’ Bellos rolled onto his side and pushed himself to sitting. Staring at where he thought Valerius sat, he said, very quietly, ‘You have to leave me, Julius. I would rather manage here alone in hope than wait with you through the spring for mac Calma to come back, praying daily to your gods and mine to hear his voice. I don’t think I have the strength for that.’

Bellos had more strength than either of them had realized, in body as well as in mind. Valerius stayed for a day and guided him through continual practice, at the end of which the youth could prepare a meal without cutting his fingers and had demonstrated that he could find a jug and drag himself to the stream to fill it.

Towards dusk, the bannock-girl appeared with a jointed hare and Valerius walked off to check on the horses, leaving Bellos to speak to her. Returning, he found Bellos with more colour to his cheeks than at any time since he had fallen, and a smile that was

not so clearly forced. A pot simmered on the fire and the smell of stewed hare meat and wild garlic filled the still air by the stream.

They ate together after dark when there was nothing else to practise or to clear or to clean. Bellos said, ‘I told her you’d be gone with the dawn and that, whether you found mac Calma or not, you’d be back by the full moon. I think she’ll help while you’re gone. She won’t be in trouble for it. Efnis knows that she comes here.’

‘I thought he might.’ Valerius had spent his walk considering the timeliness of the girl’s appearances. ‘I’d wager that mac Calma told them both to act as they did before he left. Very little he does seems to rely on chance.’

‘I was right, then? You will leave with the dawn?’

‘I will, unless I can call mac Calma tonight in the dream. It’s worth trying. You never know; the hare is Nemain’s beast and Airmid was always of Nemain. Perhaps having eaten the god’s beast in the god’s domain, I will find that I can live true to my birthright.’

Bellos stared at him. For the first time since his fall, his eyes focused close to where Valerius sat. He asked, ‘Does that matter to you now?’

‘Only as a tool. I am tired of being another man’s toy. If I could heal you on my own, I would do, you know that. Because I can’t, I must call on mac Calma’s aid. If I could call the gods on my own, to ask their help in healing, I would be free of all men.’

Bellos laid down his bowl and stretched out like a hound near the fire. ‘And would it be good to be free of all men?’

‘It would be little short of perfect.’

As an officer of the auxiliary cavalry, Julius Valerius had passed many nights without sleep in situations far less clement than a fire lit hut on a stream’s edge, with his belly filled and the scents of garlic, woodsmoke and hare’s meat warming his senses.

Perhaps because of that, he did not, as he had intended, remain awake to seek the gods’ help in the fire, but slept and, in sleeping, dreamed, disjointedly and unpleasantly, of his mother and mac Calma walking, sleeping, lying together as lovers in the ancient, sacred places of Hibernia in the year before his birth.

Rome had been a distant enemy then, and all conflicts small, although they had not seemed so. Valerius’ mother had been

young, and not angry. She had felt the presence of the boy-child growing in her womb and had loved him. She had lain alone under a white full moon and named the child Ban, meaning white in the language of Hibernia, for the colour of it. Pressing her hands together over his heartbeat and hers, she said, ‘You will be Nemain’s, and will grow in her care. I will see to it.’

Luain mac Calma had come to her later, with news of conflict growing in Gaul and the death of the dreamers at the hands of Rome. Macha had always known that he must leave, but Valerius, who had once been Ban, felt in the womb and in his dreaming self the pain of their parting, the emptiness of promises not made because they would be hollow.

The loss was too sharp to be borne. Breaking free from his mother, Valerius watched from afar as she bought a good mare from the Hibernian breeding herds and a hound that had taken deer in full flight and journeyed east, to the village of her birth where her sister had a two-year-old girl-child by a man named Eburovic.

Macha was clearly pregnant when she arrived. Eburovic did not love her, nor she him, but they had known one another from childhood and there was a great affection between them. His fathering of her child was to be a temporary thing, until Luain mac Calma came back from Gaul. Neither the gods nor the dreamers told them it would be close to fourteen years before the Elder’s return.

The dream of Macha wavered as she came closer to birth. Breaca was there, a fox-haired girl-child learning to walk with Graine, her mother, but it was Eburovic, big and blunt and kind-hearted, with nothing of the dreamer about him at all, who, smiling, filled the last, thinly woven moments.

Valerius woke, too sharply, and lay with his eyes open gazing at the shuddering light on the back wall of the hut. The fire burned behind him, warming the small of his back. He stared at stone and saw the face of Luain mac Calma, wet from the shipwreck with his black hair hanging in sea-ropes to his shoulders.

The man smiled, sadly. ‘Eburovic raised you. It was the gods’ will, not mine, but he did it well, however much I might regret it. Still, you are my son, not his. You can run, but you cannot deny who made you. I offer you now your birthright. Will you take it?’

Often before, Valerius had thought himself awake and found it not true. In Rome, he had watched Dubornos attempt to prove himself dreaming by passing his hand through a wall and had noted it as a dreamer’s technique, simple in its concept and likely to succeed. Now, he sat up and, very deliberately, put the heel of

one hand against the embers of the fire, holding it there until the pain crushed his breathing and layers of reddened skin peeled away.

The pain drove both the voice and the image of mac Calma from his head, but the dream still held him, as tightly formed as any memory, and as real. Cursing softly, he found his cloak and stepped quietly past the sleeping Bellos into the night.

The night was still and warm, lit by an amber half-moon. Owls called in the woods beyond the dreamers’ great-house. Closer by, the stream whispered in foreign tongues. The small beasts of the night shuffled and blundered in old leaves and new spring grass. At the foot of the hill, the bay gelding whickered a quiet greeting.

The route Valerius took was not planned. He needed only to prove himself firmly awake and he could return to bed, to sleep one last night in a hut that he had begun to consider his own. He crossed the stream in bare feet, letting the chilled water swill at his ankles, then turned left, through the trees towards the horse fields, searching as he did so the vent in the hem of his cloak where he hid the grain for the horses.

The hawthorn hedge bounding the paddocks was served by a gap, the width of a man, but not a horse. Valerius had fitted his shoulder through and was reaching for the gelding when a voice behind him said, ‘When you were dreaming, which gods did you petition, yours or mine?’

He was still dreaming, then; the fire had been an illusion, as much as the water of the stream and the coarse grass beneath his feet. In this dream, he had some control of his own actions, which was pleasant. He pushed on through the hedge and met the gelding, warming his hands on a muzzle that was nothing more than a product of his mind. The beast seemed as solid as he did in life, but then dreams always seem so from the inside. It is only on waking that one can see the gaps that make them unreal.

Mac Calma’s voice said, ‘Valerius, answer me. It matters.’

The voice was entirely compelling. Unwillingly, Valerius said, ‘I have no gods. I served Mithras once, but do so no longer. I abandoned him when I was banished from the legions. The gods of the tribes abandoned me long ago and take their vengeance where they can. I called on none of them by name, only made my need known.’

‘So. And it surprises you, therefore, that none came? Have you learned so little in your life?’

‘You sound like my mother. Her ghost despises me also. Are you dead, then, that you can sound so?’

‘Hardly. I don’t despise you. It is you who hates me. Have you found the key to Bellos’ healing?’

In dreaming there is an honesty that waking may lack. Valerius said, ‘No. But I have found that I no longer wish to depend on you to make it happen. It occurs to me that you have never told me why you brought me here. If it was to learn healing, you have never tried to teach it, or dreaming, but then I have never asked to learn. I remember, once, the grandmothers saying that a dreamer must ask to be given the dream. Last night, I asked it of the nameless gods. Tonight, I ask it of you.’

‘Thank you.’ The hedge shivered and Luain mac Calma stood in the moonlight, soothing the neck of the gelding, which was not surprised to see him.

Valerius tried to pass his hand through the horse and failed. He stared at his feet and moved his toes and they remained his toes and did not become cloven, or bird-clawed, or grow the nails of a hound. Self-loathing curdled in the pit of his stomach. Raising his head, he said bitterly, ‘You woke me. Why?’

Mac Calma shook his head in mild reproof. ‘To save you taking ship with the dawn to look for me. I thought I might prevent at least one journey’s seasickness. Some men might be grateful.’

‘You could have woken me by touch. That did not take a dream.’

‘But there are things you will believe in dreaming that you will not believe waking. Do you believe now that I am your father?’

‘We have spoken of this before. Eburovic raised me. That’s all that matters.’

‘No. You are the son of two dreamers and that matters now. You were born to be a dreamer. You were named for the white moon and the black night about it. Ban of the Eceni, you have spent the past twenty years running from your birthright. I offer it to you now, this once, this last time. Will you take it?’

‘Will you heal Bellos if I do?’

‘I will heal him anyway. If you come to sit your long-nights, then you must come willingly, not under coercion. You must know that you come through a gateway as dangerous as any you passed when you led your cavalry wing. You must know that the commitment is total, that any failure means death, not only of your body

but of your soul, and that even I, who am Elder of Mona, cannot keep you safe from that. Knowing all of that, if you wish still to take what is yours by right, I will teach you, however those of my great-house loathe me for it. If you do not have the courage, I will heal Bellos to the best of my ability, and you will be free.’

Valerius gazed past the Elder of Mona to the moon, which had risen higher and was white. The hare had not yet come to rest on its surface and the salute Valerius made acknowledged that, as his mother had taught him.

From the corner of his eye, he saw a tension leak from mac Calma that he had not known was present. Softly, the man who claimed to be his father said, ‘If you wish a day to consider you may have it. I will work on Bellos while you think.’

‘Thank you. A day will not make any difference to this decision. You offer me the chance to sit my long-nights. I accept.’

XV.

‘They are not built for us.’

Graine spoke with the assurance of a sworn dreamer and was not heard. Breaca knew that her daughter had spoken, but the words merged with the meaningless sounds of morning: the slowing breath of her mare and the creak of harness leather as she settled to stillness on the crest of the hill; the clash of chain mail from the auxiliary escort still riding the slope behind, and the fainter, identical clash from the century of legionaries marching in formation out of Camulodunum’s triumphal gate onto the plain below; the rasping cry of a single crow, far back, in the place where there should have been forest, but instead was bare earth.

All of these Breaca registered and none made sense. From the moment of cresting the hill, from the moment of Cunomar’s first startled oath and Cygfa’s war curse, every part of her had fixed on the two newly made oakwood crosses that stood alone on the north-eastern corner of the city. Twice the height of a man and one across, they were more than enough to hang the Boudica and any one of her children.

Pale in the morning sun, they cast angular shadows across the turf in a statement more eloquent, more shattering, than the governor’s deftly phrased invitation. We have you, we own you. Your death is ours, the time of it and the manner. Do not expect mercy from the emperor or those who serve him.

It was impossible to look elsewhere, impossible, for that moment, to think. Cunomar had said as much in a rare moment of

honesty when he had first come back from Rome; that however much one tried to imagine the worst to make it bearable, however much one built the nightmares and dismantled them, the solid presence of a cross shattered the world.

Breaca had never stood in the shadow of her own execution as had her two older children. In the long, still breath at the top of Camulodunum’s hill, she learned the nature and extent of their terror and her respect for them both reached new heights.

A small hand closed on Breaca’s wrist. Graine said for a second time, distinctly, ‘Don’t look at them so. They have not yet tasted blood, but they were not made for us. A warrior of the tribes will die and one of Rome and both are already held in prison. We have not yet been betrayed.’

She was a child. All the way up the slope, she had ridden her new horse with both hands gripping the front of the saddle as an infant might, but her voice was as old, and as sure, as it had been on an afternoon in the forge when she had spoken for the elder grandmother.

Breaca nodded, lacking words. Beside her, Cunomar stirred. ‘And so are we to believe that legions are marching out to do us honour, not arrest us?’

He tried so hard to appear unmoved. His voice was lightly detached, his words the casual comment of one observing the distant return of a bird to the nest, or the birth of a midseason lamb. His face was set, held still by a thin shell of pride and an obstinate refusal to show fear in the presence of the enemy.