Dreaming the Hound (39 page)

It was sacrilege, perpetrated in the name of the god, and Valerius’ every sense screamed at the sight of it. He turned and found at the back of the cave an altar of marble and the small part of him that could think tried to imagine how it had been brought in through the tunnel. The rest of him studied the carvings around it and the wrought gold and the painted icons and saw them, too, as sacrilege.

In disgust, he said, ‘Do they not know you?’

They think they do. Are you any different?

Valerius turned back to the water far more slowly than he had turned away. Nemain had not appeared to him in a vision, nor spoken aloud so that her voice rolled off the water-jewelled rock, shaking him where he stood.

Mithras did both. The god was not kneeling in fire as he had before. He had no bull, alive or dead, at his feet, but the hound that was shown with him always in the carvings and the friezes of the cellars beneath each Roman fortress stood at his heel, its head level with his thigh. In the images, it was small and lop-eared; a smooth haired southern sight-hound, from the hot deserts of Mithras’ birth.

In the cave of the god in the mountains of Britannia, the hound was tall with prick ears and a harsh, broken coat and the spatterings of white stood out on its mane so that it could have stood recently in snow. It was the hound of the ancestors’ dreaming chamber, that had departed at the foot of the god’s mountain, and it was Hail, who was dead and had been given to Briga. It should not have come also in the company of any foreign god, much less one so closely entwined with the legions.

Valerius opened his mouth and closed it again. Nemain watched and offered no help.

Amused, Mithras said, I ask you again. Do you know me, Julius Valerius, smith of Hibernia?

Valerius found his voice, which surprised him. ‘I do not presume

so much. I never have.’

And yet you clear the false offerings from the mouth of my cave and feel grief at the entrapment of my lake.

‘I would not see you in pain.’

So then you understand that much. I will ask differently. Do you know me, Ban of the Eceni?

‘No.’

Valerius spoke without thinking, from the twisting place in his chest where old pain was still rooted. Four years before, that would have been enough. Today, now, from the openness into which Nemain had drawn him, he said, ‘As Julius Valerius, decurion of the cavalry and servant of the emperor, I could have come to know you. As Ban, I can only be given to Nemain.’

But you are not Ban. You do not answer to that name, nor think of yourself so in your dreams. I ask you again: as Valerius, whom do you serve?

One does not speak twice without due thought in the presence of a god. Valerius stood in the centre of the cavern and watched the light of his candle bleed through the gaps between the iron staves. Once, it would have been light enough to set fire to the lake and bring the place alive, but no longer. The god stood on mute water while channels of withered flame barely touched his feet. Valerius let his mind stretch out to meet them, and reached for an answer.

For three years on Hibernia, he had lived only as Valerius, and had believed himself godless. Now, knowing differently, he had not found who he might be, except that he was not yet Ban of the Eceni, nor was he any longer Julius Valerius, citizen of Rome and decurion of the Thracian cavalry.

At the feet of the bull-god, the hound dipped its head and drank of the firelight. Here, in this place, its pelt was clotted at the neck where the death wound had bled out. It snuffed the air and pricked its ears and trotted forward, leaping the iron staves as if they were sticks laid flat on the ground. Reaching Valerius, it nudged its nose into his lax hand and, as he had in the ancestors’ chamber, he felt the warmth and wetness of it as if it were real.

In the presence of the gods, nothing happens by accident. Valerius knelt as Mithras had once knelt and ruffled the dream hound’s ears. Looking out over the water, he said, ‘Is this my hound, or yours?’

If you are given to me, what is mine is yours.

If… The word spanned the air between man and god, vibrantly, opening doors that Valerius had long believed closed.

If… The god walked forward along avenues of fire. His face was that of a youth, his eyes eternally old. His hair was the colour of the morning sun and in his smile he held the beauty, and the savage power, of every dawn there had ever been. No man could meet him without love, nor fail to know regret at his departing.

Valerius, who had served him for fifteen years without such a meeting and so without love, felt himself crushed beneath a mountain’s weight of loss.

In anguish, he said, ‘I cannot be what I was. I cannot go back.’

Would you wish to?

‘No. I have been given my birthright. Who I am now is the truth.’ Desperate, Valerius searched for Nemain and found her and nothing changed but that his soul came into balance and his confusion was not unheard. She did not force a choice, as Mithras had not. Even so, he could see no way that a man could serve two such disparate gods and hold himself intact.

A flame wavered on the flat mirror of the water. The god was close enough to touch. Quietly, he said, Who are you now, Valerius, walker between the worlds? Julius Valerius was as fully of Rome as Ban was of the Eceni and neither will easily be laid to rest, however much you may seek to do so. Must you now renounce one to keep faith with the other? The choice is yours. No god can make it for you.

Valerius had not come seeking choice, but an ending. For too long, he said nothing, staring at the iron staves and the stuttering candle. Then the quality of the silence changed and when he looked again the god was flowing into the fire and the fire into the water.

The loss was devastating. Abandoned, he sank to his knees and wept. Scalding tears melted tracks on his cheeks. He wanted urgently to swear fealty, all choices made, and could not; his voice was no longer at his command.

The coarse-pelted hound turned towards the lake and whined once, softly, then turned back and nudged Valerius’ hand.

Through the echoing chamber of the cave, Mithras’ voice reached him, softly. Seek who it is that you have become, walker between the worlds. If you can find that, the peace of the gods will be open to you, and not only as you walk in the light of Nemain’s moon.

Valerius was alone, kneeling on the rock of the chamber’s floor, shaking as badly as he ever did on ocean crossings. The hound made him sit up, made him stand, shoved at his leg so that he must brace against it or fall over. He wanted to be sick and did not dare so defile the god’s cavern, however badly it had already been defiled.

The thought of that moved him. He had brought with him no tools, but he believed it possible that even empty-handed he could undo the worst of what men with tools had done.

The iron staves set around the lake were easiest to remove; the holes in which they were set were not deep, the mortar already rotten in the damp air. He raised them, one at a time, and stacked them against the wall near the tunnel that led to the outer world. The altar was more complicated. It was not ugly; in the right place it might have been beautiful, but this was not the right place. Examining it, Valerius found that it had been made in sections, and so understood how it had been brought through the tunnel. The flat marble of the top lifted clear and the four walls were held by wooden pegs within.

It took some effort to prise it apart, but he had time and an energy that must be vented on something. The gold and frippery around the edges were easily removed. His only question was where to dispose of the pieces. He could not hurl them into the lake - of all the water in the world, this was not Nemain’s - nor could he drag the marble out through the tunnel alone and without ropes or rollers.

The candles were nearly used up. He lit the third from the stump of the second and watched the two flames wind round each other in the loose air. They tipped to his left, towards the tunnel’s mouth through which he had come, blown by a draught that came from the opposite side of the cavern. Valerius turned on one heel and stared at the wall of dark rock.

‘So now, do you think I can go into the other cavern? The gods would not let me before.’

Valerius spoke to the hound, which gave no answer, but it did not hold him back when he lifted a bundle of iron stakes under one arm and searched for the mouth of the cave-within-cave that he had found once before. This opening had not been outlined in white lime. It was unlikely that the engineers with their drills and mortar had not seen it, but, like Valerius on his last visit, they may have been warned away by a power too great to be ignored. Ś

The entrance looked no more inviting than it had done before.

The candle drifted and spat and cast more shadows than it did light. Valerius squeezed himself sideways and slid his shoulders into the cleft that led to the new cave - and waited.

No voice came to stop him. The still place in his soul held no warning.

A greater draught blew out the candle. Valerius was not afraid of the dark. He reminded himself of this fact three times as he propped the iron staves against the wall of the inner cavern and felt his way back whence he had come. His years in the legions had made him methodical if nothing else; the iron staves were stacked together in a row and he arranged the pieces of the altar in size order alongside. Carrying them into the inner cave was slow work, made slower by the lack of light and the need to feel his way, but Valerius became faster with practice so that the gold and icons of the altar pieces were easily taken further into the inner cavern and laid on ledges that he had come to know by touch.

He laid the last one in place and stood still, snuffing the air as a deer might do, scenting danger. He felt no threat, only a sense of great age and a watchfulness that was not his and a fainter touch of something that might have been a greeting, or at least an acknowledgement of his presence. There was a dryness to it that did not match the damp of the cavern but made him think of newly shed leaves before the rains of winter pulp them, or a snake skin, found soon after shedding.

He walked a little way forward, beyond the furthest point of his exploration, and let the draught lift the hair from his forehead.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I leave these in your care. They are not wrong in themselves, only in the wrong place for the wrong reasons. One day they may be right.’

The ancient, watching dark opened a little to drink in his words. He expected something to be given in return and was disappointed. The echo of Mithras’ last words filtered faintly in the air, but the laden fragments of sound had shivered back and forth since the god departed and Valerius continued to ignore them. He had no intention of choosing anything until he had slept and eaten and was safely clear of the legions quartered in the valley below.

Without thinking, he pursed his lips and whistled gently for the hound as he used to do for Hail when he was a child. It nudged against his thigh, in the place it most belonged, and together they felt their way round Mithras’ newly sanctified cavern to the mouth of the exit tunnel.

Collecting the stubs of his three candles, Valerius bowed towards the black-water lake. He felt a cleanliness that buoyed him and made less onerous the choices. Knowing the god-space twice filled laid on him a peace that was not, after all, only of Nemain.

Holding that thought, and the newness of it, he said Thank you. I am grateful, always, for the gift of your presence. I will honour you, whatever happens.’

The god’s echo enfolded him. Choose well, Valerius.

Emerging was the rebirth into joy that he had imagined at the ancestors’ mound in Hibernia and had not experienced. Late morning sun blinded him, and the dazzle from the pool beneath the waterfall.

Thundering water and the scream of the buzzard swamped his ears and pierced his mind. Sharp air and sharper water shocked his face and he drank them all in and kept drinking, even as the men who sprang from the earth behind him took hold of his arms and crushed ropes on his wrists and kicked him twice in the belly so that he fell to the ground, sobbing for air, with dark and light and dark smashing through his closed eyes, and still a part of him was entranced by the morning and did not understand what was happening.

XXII.

THE HOUND DID NOT STAY WITH VALERIUS AT HIS CAPTURE, NOR did it return as the four men, half a tent party of the XXth legion, beat him unconscious and then threw him in the pool beneath the waterfall to bring him round and then propped him between them, two in front, two behind, and marched him, with pauses to kick him again, down the mountain.

On the rare occasions when he could speak, Valerius called to the hound, sending it to find mac Calma, to keep it safe from harm, as if a god-given hound could be harmed by men. The rest of the time was lost to a sea of reddening pain, so that, in the end, he let go of his mind because it was easier to hide in the dark of unconsciousness and to trust his own body to ride the kicking as best it could without his interference.

There had been no need to ask where they were going; he had led these parties often enough himself. Perversely, he woke as they threw open the door to the inquisitors’ chamber beneath the quartermaster’s stores in the southwest corner of the barracks; the sound of unoiled hinges triggered too many memories for him to sink again into oblivion.

The room was built of coarse-hewn oak with a gravel floor and a single barred window to let in light and air. The fortress’s grain store was directly above it, with spare harness stored in the loft above that. It was not noticeably worse than any other prison but the dreamers of the tribes brought here for questioning had feared this room more than they had feared the inquisitors and their irons.

Towards the end of his stay in the fortress, Valerius had known at least three who had broken simply as a result of having been left here overnight. He had always thought that it was the grain store that was the cause; that life in a roundhouse had left them unprepared for the skills of Rome’s engineers and the realization that they were locked in a room with a year’s supply of grain suspended above their heads had shattered their minds.