Dreaming the Hound (42 page)

If we had five hundred like you … even fifty … Breaca had said it in spring, wishing aloud on the bodies of the slain Coritani slave sellers, and then had spent the summer making the smaller wish real.

They were not like him, these desperate, terrified, hopeful children with their hair woven tight into warrior’s braids and bear grease and the white lime bear-paint swirling across their beautiful, unmarked bodies; they had not spent nine days alone in a midwinter cave with a sleeping she-bear learning the texture of their own silence as Cunomar had done, nor hunted, with only a knife, a bear known to kill men for sport, nor lived under the searing knives of the elders for three days afterwards, learning how unending, unendurable pain might open their souls.

More importantly, they had not spent nine months in solitary tuition, taught by the dozen finest minds of the Caledonii; such a luxury was not theirs to have in the lands of the Eceni, but they had spent two months of days building a great-house after the manner of their ancestors and of nights learning the ways of spear and blade as their parents had done and they themselves had never been allowed to do. In that was the beginning of their warrior’s path.

A dark-haired girl came at him, her braid working loose and her lime paint smeared by sweat and exertion. Her eyes were white rimmed and her nostrils flaring. She had a bruise on her right arm, up high, near the shoulder. If he tried, Cunomar could remember putting it there some time, long ago, at the beginning of the night.

If he thought about that, she would strike past his guard and cut him, which must not happen. He shifted his grip on his blade and raised it to block her strike and then cut past and blocked again and cut and moved into the rhythm of strikes he had taught her, waiting for the stillness to settle on her mind so that she might find the speed and surety to break out of the rhythm and put in a real attack.

The girl cut at his leg, and then the other, and then, as he raised his blade to match hers, she reversed her grip and used the hilt to

strike his forearm. Pain made him grunt and he saw satisfaction and laughter flicker across her face but he had already moved to one side and used his elbow to shove her guard down and struck sideways, flicking his wrist so that the tip of his blade cut across her chest, high up, near the collarbone, in a long, slicing wound. She gasped aloud and stepped back and he saw on her face the same mix of pain and exultation he had seen on half a dozen of the others. These few were exceptional; the rest had shown pain and shock and a quieter satisfaction. If there were ever to be an elite within his honour guard, this girl and the handful like her would be it.

Unagh. Her name was Unagh, from the northern Wash, which had once been Efnfs’ home. Cunomar remembered it even as he lowered his blade and smeared the sweat from his palms and stepped aside saying, ‘Warrior of the Eceni, you may pass.’

He thought she was the last, but was not certain. Tired, he leaned on the doorpost to the great-house, feeling newly planed wood smooth on his shoulder. Once, the building of such a place would have been planned ten years in advance, with the oaks that would make it marked and trained straight and the willow staves to bind the walls grown in place so that their roots would hold them secure and the reeds and straw for the thatch collected and dried in the height of summer.

Cunomar and his followers had made do with oak scavenged from the deeper forest and willow that must take root of its own accord later and more straw than reed for the thatch and most of that damp. It had survived the autumn gales and he wanted to believe it would survive the snows of winter, but was not certain.

There was snow in the air now; with the warriors gone he could smell it. He stretched an arm beyond the overhang of thatch at the doorway and felt the first feather touch of wetness, gone to nothing in a heartbeat on the heat of his hand.

Firelight from within caught the flash of a blade ahead of him. Straightening, he raised his own blade to guard. From the night Breaca said, amused, ‘If we are to fight, it should be in front of the elders. They would not want to miss that; the bear against the Boudica, they would talk of it for years, especially if one of was hurt,’ and then, coming close enough for him to see her, ‘Did they all pass?’

‘All.’

‘Good. Then we can set them the spear-trial and hope they don’t let the presence of their elders confuse them. You lead. This is your night. Ours comes after.’

The spear-trial of those who would join Cunomar’s honour guard was held after the manner of the ancestors: indoors, sending the spears over thirty paces at targets of straw lit only by torchlight. The elders were drawn from their steadings and those nearby. Over a hundred had come; more than had gathered in the forest’s heart two years before to determine the Boudica’s future amongst the Eceni.

These were not youths who had grown under the yoke of Rome, but adults who had survived invasion and occupation and revolt and the savage reprisals that had followed it. These were the men and women who valued life above honour, or who felt that, in living, they served their people better. These were not ones who had stood and fought the legions, or spat on the auxiliary, or openly continued to act as dreamers for their communities in the face of Rome’s ban.

Very few of them had been trained on Mona; they did not live in the dreaming as Airmid did, or know the winter tales and their hidden meanings as Dubornos had been taught. Even so, they had found the courage to travel at the end of the year, when the trackways were hock deep in slick mud and Roman patrols still scoured them, and they remembered the spear-trials of old, and could bear witness to them, as was needful.

The young warriors threw in groups of four or five, lining themselves along the mark, readying themselves as if they had trained for life, and not simply two months of evenings in the forest. Their blades caught the reddening light of the fire pits, making suns in the gloom. The song of the spears filled the great-house and became less, as each one sought to join with the soul of the warrior who held it.

‘Just still the voice of your mind,’ Breaca had said, long ago, and Eneit, who had understood the full measure of that, had said, ‘Just?’ and had done it even while he laughed at the impossibility.

The newly made warriors were not Eneit, but they gave all their hearts to try. Cunomar stood to one side, waiting to give the order to throw as his mother had done in the forest lifetimes ago, when, for him, the song of the spears had been impossible to hear.

Each time, with each new group, he felt the tension and nerves and growing calm as they strove to listen only to the voice of the spear, not the voice of their own fear and doubt. Each time, when he thought time had stretched too far and it was not possible to find the stillness, it crept on him and he said, ‘Throw!’ quietly and they did and their spears hit the targets as he had known they Would do, except for four who would be allowed to try again in spring; they had not risked so much to fail this close to the end.

At the end, forty-nine warriors of the Eceni stood before Cunomar, in the presence of their elders, and swore oaths on their spears as had their ancestors, their lives for his, each life for the other, in the sight and care of the gods, for all time.

‘Your son has come into his own. Responsibility has settled what the bear-dreamers began.’

‘It would seem so. Through winter we will know for certain.’ Breaca leaned on the oak post to one side of the threshold where the firelight caught her least. For now, it mattered that Cunomar hold the attention of the new warriors and their elders and that his mother keep to the shadows.

Ardacos crouched on the floor at her side, mending the binding on his spear. Their voices were lost in the rising murmur from the ranks of elders who lined the fire pits to the north side of the space. In the other half, the last of the newly made warriors rose to her feet and, defying the solemnity of her peers, raised her spear high above her head and spun it, whooping an old Eceni war cry. After a moment’s shocked silence, those around her did the same. The roof thatch resounded to the high pitch of battle.

Ardacos turned to Breaca. ‘She’s like Braint. She fights like a wildcat. If she lives past her first battle, she will be good.’

‘We have to bring them to battle for that to happen and we can’t do that yet.’ Breaca pushed herself away from the doorpost. All attention was on the howling youths and Cunomar, who, soberly, had stepped forward to calm them. In the time it took for silence to fall, Breaca walked round the side of the elders and reached her place at the far wall, opposite the door. There, a bundle of folded horse hides made a bench. A bronze shield hung on the wall behind, with the serpent-spear bold on its surface so that when she stood, the two heads of the spear seemed to emerge from her heart, if she sat, it crowned her.

She stood. Ardacos had followed her and now laid some wood in the nearest fire pit. Flames caught and grew and were caught in turn by the bronze of the shield and sent outwards by the curve of the metal so that, slowly, it became a second fire, and the iron of her drawn sword in the middle a star.

The attention of the elders came to her, drawn by the blaze of light and metal, by the white lime paint on her face and arms, by the warrior’s braid, worn openly for the first time in the east, with the silver feather, black-quilled, for the uncounted numbers she had slain in battle.

Presently, when the sea of turned heads had become, instead, a

sea of faces, of eyes reflecting the fire, Breaca nic Graine, first born of the royal line, said, ‘Welcome, elders of the Eceni. Against Rome’s edict, you have come here. There is not one of you who has not risked life to be present. Knowing that risk, you have borne witness to the first spear-trials to be held on Eceni land for seventeen years. Seventeen. Those who have today become warriors were not born when Rome’s legions slaughtered their fathers and grandmothers, their aunts and cousins. If we allow another twenty years to pass, the children of these new-made warriors will grow in a land where the spear-trials are at best a memory, at worst, forgotten.’

They were hers, every part of their attention. She let them dwell on that, and signalled Cunomar. Smoothly, the product of much rehearsal, he led the forty-nine youths of his honour guard to make a curving line behind her.

She sat down, so that the bronze shield spilled red fire onto her hair, and flushed the skins of the nearest warriors. ‘Tonight, an honour guard is born, of those whom you sent to us in the summer. They are not many, but given ten times as many we might bring the legions back to an eastern war …’

A dozen elders winced at the word. Those who had not sent youths, but might have done, sat stone-faced and dared her to continue.

‘… but that war cannot begin without the express consent of the elder council. It has always been so and if we are to fight to preserve our heritage, we will not ignore the old ways. The time is not yet. Too many cleave to ‘Tagos, who is held to rule us under Rome. The balance is fine. While he lives, we cannot openly raise warriors against Roman edict, and so—’

‘Will you kill him?’

The question came from one of the strongest dissenters: a square jawed man with greying hair who had shaken his head and murmured to his neighbour from the first moment the Boudica spoke of war. He was of Unagh’s steading, the wildcat girl with Braint’s heart. She stood near Cunomar, a picture of mortified youth.

Breaca allowed time to consider the question. ‘If he were dead, would you vote for war?’ she asked.

‘Not if you had killed him.’

‘Which is one of the lesser reasons why I will not. Greater is that I have never and will never kill a man or woman of the Eceni simply because their beliefs do not match mine. ‘Tagos believes the

people are best served by their closeness to Rome. I believe that under the yoke of the legions, the Eceni will cease to exist. In this we are different, but the Ninth legion has its fortress a day’s ride to the north and the Twentieth still has three thousand men at Camulodunum, and we cannot presume to defeat these two. I know this; I do not intend to bring our people to the brink of ruin. But it may be the gods will grant a time to act and we should prepare for that, or for ever regret its passing.’

The fire-shield weighed nothing; it had been made to honour the gods and the elders, not for battle. Breaca lifted it from the peg on the wall and hooked the strap over her shoulder, settling it in battle position. The flames at her feet were lower than they had been; the ashes glowed red on the shining metal. She tilted the shield so that light flowed down and she was in shadow, her voice flooding from darkness, with Mona’s power behind.

‘You have each risked your life to come here. The spear-trials are done and you are free to leave. But I invite you first to stay and to talk for as long as it takes, as we did in the elder councils of the days before Rome, to determine the case for war. If your decision is that we should fight, it will still not be easy, but we can begin, then, to determine how it may be done.’

‘And if we decide against? Will you return to Mona as was asked of you by some of us two years ago?’ Unagh’s elder asked it, his face too masked to read.

‘No. I am Eceni and my children with me. We will stay and we will act as the elder council requires of us. My son’s honour guard will disband and the warriors will be offered the opportunity to follow their souls to the lands of the Caledonii or to return with you to their steadings.’

‘Is that the view of you all?’

The Boudica stood again at the head of the council, with Ardacos ‘ and Cunomar beside her and the bronze shield at her back.

Her eyes were full of smoke and the grit of no-sleep. She ached to sit down, to lie down, to sleep and not to have to talk ever again of Rome and all it might bring, or the Eceni and what they might grow to be in a land free of occupation. Over the span of a day and a half, the gathered elders had talked and argued and talked and eaten and talked and slept and woken and gone outside to use the middens in twos and threes and talked and come back in again and talked further.