Dreaming the Hound (34 page)

It did not seem possible that any night would ever again seem dark. The sliver of Nemain’s moon was as bright as the noon sun. Unable to look at the god directly, Valerius watched her reflection slide over the river. Water was her domain. As a child, he had believed that proximity to water drove men mad and women madder. Now, he welcomed the calm that it gave.

The water was alive; small fish kissed the surface, larger ripples backed off stones and wove into each other, the moon broke and scattered so that the whole surface of the water became boiling silver, oddly inviting. When the shine stretched from one bank to the other, Valerius stood and shed his clothes and stepped down and out to immerse himself to the neck and beyond in water so cold that it burned.

As the ancestors’ chamber had scoured his mind, so did Nemain’s river scour his skin. He lay back with only his nose above the surface, and then not even that. His hair was longer than it had ever been and it floated behind like weed, both buoying his head

and teasing it under. His skin grew to like the cold, so that the water and the smooth rocks of the river bed caressed him rather than chafing and he revelled in the feel of it, who had slept five years alone and forgotten what it was to be touched with care. He spread his arms and his legs against the current and slowly, between one breath and the next, the river became a lover, moving him with a passion as great as any he had felt for Corvus or Longinus or the unfulfilled, unacknowledged longing for Caradoc.

He fought it at first; the river did not just belong to Nemain, it was Nemain, daughter to Briga, watcher of all life, birth-bringer, holder of cycles. All his life, he had imagined this god as Airmid, so that often in his dreams the two were one. Valerius had never knowingly wanted Airmid, or any woman, could not imagine ever doing so, but the river touched him elsewhere than the flesh, and his mind was too tired to resist the pull of a god and he gave himself over to it, remembering only to breathe when the surface came to meet him.

Afterwards, he wondered why he had done that; drowning was by no means the worst way to die. Shivering, he drew himself onto the bank, cold and spent, empty in ways the dream hill had not left him. He dressed and made the fire bigger and the flames were no longer too bright to watch, nor the eastern horizon where the first fire of the sun poured molten gold on the earth.

The moon still dallied in the west, a ghosted sickle outshone by the greater light of the sun. Valerius turned to face it and sat a while, unthinking.

In the past, ghosts and gods alike had spoken to him in voices too loud to be ignored. Here, on the banks of the river that was for ever sacred to the daughter of Briga, Valerius found for the first time what it was to hear the whisper of a god, to sense a knowing that passed beyond words as Nemain came to rest in the core of his being.

She did not offer a vision of future glory, or an end to all grief; he would not have believed either of these, nor asked for them. Instead, through the slow setting of the moon, he discovered within himself the totality of all joy and all pain and the place of his soul as the balance between. It was as great a gift as he had ever been given and there seemed no possibility that it could be taken away.

Presently, when the whispering ceased and all that was left was the feather-touch of moonlight and a passing memory of water, he stood and extinguished his fire, dismantling it and covering the ash so that no trace was left of his passing.

He was kneeling, scattering dead leaves over the cut-lines of the turf when, from somewhere behind his left shoulder, Luain mac

Calma asked, ‘Where are you going?’

It was not unexpected, only later than it might have been. Still kneeling, Valerius answered, ‘I was going to Mona, to find Bellos and discuss with him his future as one blind in the land of the sighted. With the right training, I believe he may still make a good healer. After that, as soon as the seas are open to shipping, I thought I might cross the water, to Britannia. I met Mithras there once, in a cave. If I am to live, I must make my peace with him.’

‘And are you going to live?’

‘I have no idea.’

The morning air was sharp with frost; the first furrings of it etched the oak leaves behind mac Calma, so that his hair seemed a deeper black. His face was caught partway between the sun and the moon, not quite lit by either. He wore his dreamer’s thong of rolled birch bark at his brow for the first time in nine months and the blade at his belt was curved back at the tip to make a flaying knife.

Valerius was unarmed, and had been so since they reached Hibernia. Standing, he felt more naked than he had done when he walked into the river. His skin cringed against the rub of his tunic. Nemain had not promised long life, or the absence of pain. The awareness of that hung about him, sharply.

He ran his tongue round the edge of his teeth. ‘What is the penalty for a man who abandons his long-nights?’

Mac Calma balanced his knife on his palm. ‘Death, of course. Those who do not cut their own throats or give themselves to Nemain’s water are dealt a swift death by the one standing watch. There’s no need for further retribution. Failure itself is enough.’

‘Indeed.’ So mac Calma had, after all, been present through it all. Valerius regretted not having searched for him more thoroughly. He said, ‘I have no blade of my own with which to cut my throat.’

‘I know. And the river did not take you, although you gave yourself fully to the god. What does that tell you?’

‘That the man who claims to be my father chooses to watch without making his presence known.’ Valerius spat as they did in the legions, with much noise and a profusion of phlegm. ‘We should do what needs to be done. I don’t think there’s anything left to say that hasn’t been said in the last nine months. If you give me the blade, I’ll do it myself, to save you the blood taint.’

‘Will you fall on the blade as do the Romans? Do you so badly want to die?’

‘I don’t want to die at all. I rather think I have just been shown how to live and would welcome the chance to do so. But if there is no choice, I would rather die cleanly, by my own hand, than by the false care of another man.’

‘Valerius, you always have choice.’

Mac Calma was the Elder of Mona; he could put more meaning into one sentence than others could speak in a day, and did so. A god and a world waited while the many layers of meaning span out into being.

Valerius sat on the turf where his fire had been. The last warmth kept the frost from his feet. He looked for the moon and found the last insubstantial edge of her on the western horizon. Her presence warmed his soul. Mithras had never done that, even in the cave.

He frowned and stared at his fingers and then at the grass. A number of things became clear, and unclear.

After a while, still sitting, he said, ‘Breaca’s long-nights did not end like this.’

Luain mac Calma shed his cloak, folded it and sat on the pad. Gooseflesh stood on the bare skin of his arms. Resting his chin on the heel of his upturned hand, he said, ‘Your sister was a child who had to learn what she might become as an adult and a warrior. She had to experience in the depths of her soul the reality of life and death. You were made adult before your time and there is nothing anyone, god or dreamer, could teach you of living and dying. Where others sit their long-nights to pass from childhood to adulthood, you had to pass backwards, to unlearn what you have been in order to find what else you might yet become. Have you done so?’

Nine months of questioning were thus glibly excused. Valerius considered what he was, what he had been and what he might become. The ancestors’ chamber had loosened the anchors of his past, and Nemain had given the surety of her presence through death and beyond. Neither of these offered a solid foundation on which to build a living future. One memory tugged at him. ‘Was the hound real? The one that shared the dark?’

‘Did it seem real to you?’

‘I thought so at the time.’ The memory of a tongue on his wrist was as real, or unreal, as it had been in the chamber. Valerius said, ‘Is the hound then my dream as the hare is Airmid’s? The elder

grandmother called me horse-dreamer.’

‘And hare-hunter, as I remember. Which has never stopped you hunting deer, or boar.’

‘Or men. Indeed. I didn’t know one could choose.’

‘Few can. You are one of those few.’

‘Thank you.’

More than any dreaming, Valerius badly wanted the hound to be real, to have it run from the chamber and walk at his side, to hunt with it and ride with it and remember all that was lost. Disappointment led full circle to first hope and first loss.

I offer you your birthright.

As a child that asks for the hare who lives on the moon, Valerius said, ‘You asked me if I had found what I might yet become. There was a time when I wanted more than anything to be a warrior but I have been that and my soul was not whole there. If I were given the choice anew, I would become a dreamer. Do I have that choice?’

‘What?’ Mac Calma barked a laugh. He pushed one hand through his hair, disturbing the careful placement of his dreamer’s thong, then set it straight and pinched the end of his nose.

After a while he said, a little desperately, ‘You’ve been a dreamer since you were seven years old. You made Hail live by your dreaming. You called the red Thessalian cavalry mare across an ocean in storm by the power of your need. You saw Amminios and named the nature of his treachery in a waking vision long before any of us saw anything but the son of a warrior. Do you really not know what you are?’

The hare on the moon came close but would not be caught. Too dazzled to think, Valerius said, ‘But I don’t know how I do it. I don’t know how you do it.’

‘But you wish to learn?’

Valerius was weeping and did not care. Nemain held him and made him whole. ‘Gods, yes, I do. Yes. Before all other things, whatever the cost, I want to learn to be as you are.’

Mac Calma smiled and was ten years younger. He stood and swung his cloak over both shoulders. ‘Good. Very good. In that case, I think I can teach you. You should make your peace with

Bellos and Mithras as you planned. I’ll wait for you on Mona.’ He turned towards the river and then turned back again.

‘I think if you put your mind to calling the hound from the chamber, you may find that it will come.’

XIX.

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF QUINTUS VERANIUS, FOURTH GOVERNOR OF BRITANNIA, FIRST GOVERNOR OF LYCIA AND PAMPHYLIA …

A YEAR, EXACTLY, FROM THE DAY HE CAST A SILVER-BLADED heron-spear into the heart of a young Eceni warrior, a monument to the late governor of Britannia was unveiled just outside the steading of his friend and loyal ally, Prasutagos, king of the Eceni.

Like its twin, which was set into the wall of the theatre in Camulodunum, the stone was of grey marble, tinged almost to silver and polished to mirror brilliance. Unlike its twin, this one stood alone, set to one side of the trackway just as it left the steading. The height of a man and half that width across, it had been positioned by the Iberian mason who had fashioned and delivered it so that the rising sun might cast clean shadows across it and onto the track. Carved on its surface, square and boldly cut, was the written history of a life.

… RESOUNDING VICTORY OVER THE MOUNTAIN TRIBES CREATING PEACE FROM DISORDER. AUGUR AND CONSVL IN THE YEAR …

Mist rolled over the stone and past it, heavy as water. The unveiling ceremony had been delayed for a day in the hope that the weather might clear. Instead, the gods had thickened the air further, sending waves of swirling fog to cloak and conceal so that Breaca, standing in front and a little to one side, was locked in a land apart, sharing it only with the physician, Theophilus, on her left, and on her right Decianus Catus, the emperor’s thin, bored, arrogant and supremely dangerous procurator of taxes.

They were the best and the worst that Rome could offer. Theophilus had spent the spring and early summer after the spear challenge ministering to the dying governor, but by late summer had been free to accept Breaca’s offer and had spent the better part of three months thereafter in Eceni lands exchanging lore and healing with Airmid. Another half-year and she could have named him a dreamer and none would have argued.

The procurator, by contrast, was vermin: a leech on the life veins of the tribes. If you do not rouse the east, a ghost had said, Rome will bleed your people dry. Breaca had spent the past winter turning out spearheads and knife-blades, and the summer before that in

the quiet, careful quest for those warriors who could be trusted with her life and her plans for a future of war, but she had not yet raised an army. Lacking that, the procurator was the one who would do his best to bleed dry the Eceni and all of the eastern tribes.

He was also, in the continued absence of the governor to the western wars, the most powerful of the emperor’s men in the province of Britannia. Until Breaca had raised warriors in sufficient numbers to face the legions, there was nothing to do but offer him guest rights and let ‘Tagos negotiate such reductions in tax as might be wrenched from a man who valued everything in finger’s weights of gold.

‘Tagos had done his best. Behind, waiting in the mist, were the eighty mercenary veterans of the procurator’s personal retinue. They stood guard now over his wagons, within which, bound and double-sealed with wax and molten lead, were the bags of coins given by ‘Tagos from his money chests to be sent to the emperor’s treasury, less a judicious percentage for the procurator.

The wagons did not contain the significant quantity of hides that had been requested and nor had the procurator taken into account the worth of the three breeding stallions in the mist-bound paddocks behind the steading, or the breeding herds of mares that ran with each. He had not, either, ventured out as far as Breaca’s forge or the newly built hut behind it that harboured a store of raw iron and the bundles of blades that had been made over winter.

For these things, and the respite they offered, Breaca gave thanks.

The mist closed in more tightly. Black-carved letters lifted from the surface of the slab and snaked out across the day.