Dreaming the Hound (56 page)

Corvus leaned against the clerk’s marble desk and toyed with the soft, pooling wax beneath the elephant’s head. In Eceni, thoughtfully, as if reciting a litany, he said, ‘Son of the Boudica, I can do no more. Keep safe your father’s legacy. Do not throw away your life, as he did not.’

Looking up, he said in more formal Latin, ‘Cunomar, I am sorry

for the behaviour of my countryman. The offer of our city’s hospitality remains, for you and your honour guard, while the procurator arranges his affairs. I believe you should travel north with him, and that he would want that.’

‘He would indeed. He will, in fact, insist that the “king’s son” and his rabble be kept under armed guard until we can take them back whence they came. If you wish to feed them as they wait, you may do so, but if you let even one of them go, you will answer to the emperor for it.’

The procurator pushed past and opened the door. Outside, Unagh and the other seven of Cunomar’s honour guard waited in the cold marble space of the antechamber. Beyond that, in the square that surrounded the governor’s residence, eighty armed men of the procurator’s command waited on his word.

Left with Corvus and Theophilus in the clerk’s office, Cunomar examined and then discarded all the possible paths of action. Every one of them led to disaster; for himself, for his she-bears, for his mother, for the war host that, even now, she was raising.

Keep safe your father’s legacy. Do not throw away your life, as he did not. Corvus was as much a warrior as Cunomar; he had seen the paths and the deaths at the end of each and had tried, in his own way, to avert catastrophe. He had failed.

Cunomar had watched the dignity with which his father faced his own death in Rome. As the procurator’s men formed into a line and eight of them came into the office to escort him out, he found something close to that dignity within himself so that he could bow and say to Corvus, ‘Thank you. The prefect has always been a friend to the Eceni. My mother holds you close and will continue to do so, whatever now befalls our people.’

XXXIII.

THE GOD CAME TO VALERIUS IN THE SHAPE OF A BLACK BULL, holding the moon between its horns, or perhaps as the moon, holding fast a bull on the sickle edge of its blade.

He saw it by the light of the fire, standing near the edge of the field. It stayed there as he got up and went to find what had drawn him out. The hound walked at his side, more substantial under the old moon than the new.

The bull was a solid thing of flesh and blood, alive with the power and passions of spring. It ambled over to the thorn hedge and snuffed at Valerius’ hand and curled a long tongue round the edge of his palm for the taste of his salt sweat.

He stayed with it a while, listening to the wind in the hawthorns and the whisper of the gods, and then went back to the fire and roused Longinus who rolled over sleepily and, much as the bull had done, caught his wrist and kissed the heel of his hand.

‘You smell of cattle.’

‘There’s a bull in the field.’

‘Ah.’ Longinus tried to turn round and could not. ‘Is it red?’

‘No, black. And real, but we need to move.’

‘Why does that not surprise me?’ Awake now, Longinus sat up. Through ten days of travel, he had regained most of the weight he had lost after the battle and the haggard press of pain was gone from his eyes. He shook the sleep from his head and drank from the beaker of water that Valerius offered him.

He looked over the hedge at the bull, which looked back. ‘I didn’t know the bull-god still spoke to you since you desecrated his shrine.’

‘I restored it. That’s different. And it may not be Mithras. We’re in Eceni territory now. The ancestors of this land knew the god in the form of a bull long before the legions brought their All-father from Persia. At least you can stand; that’s good. Can you run, do you think?’

‘If I must. It was my head that was injured, not my legs. Where are we going?’

‘To find ourselves weapons not made by Rome. We’re not going far, but we need to be back here before dawn.’

‘Why can’t we ride?’

‘The place we’re going is guarded. The horses can’t go there.’

Longinus shivered. Nothing of man would guard a place against horses, but not men. ‘But we are invited?’ he asked.

‘I hope so.’

They ran and then walked and then ran again. The moon rose high in the sky and the night was no longer young.

Valerius felt a tremor through the soles of his feet, the whisper of Nemain made manifest, tinged with undercurrents far older. He

followed it forward, letting it guide his reason. Falling behind, Longinus stumbled on a thorn root. He was slowing and clearly in pain.

Valerius pushed through a thicket of briars and berry bushes with an open landscape beyond, cast in muted silver and black. It looked as he imagined the lands of the dead, which was not a good thing to think of.

He stopped by a solitary birch and waited. ‘I’m sorry. I hadn’t realized it was so far. We can rest for the day once we’ve got the blades and are back at the fire.’

Longinus reached him, breathing hard and holding his side. He grinned, tightly. ‘Don’t apologize. If we’re going to fight, I need to be fit.’ He closed his eyes and leaned back against the birch. ‘I take it we are going to fight?’

Valerius’ attention was on the hound, which had gone ahead, down a track made by another moon than the one that lit the night. Without thinking greatly, he said, ‘It would seem so. If we need blades, it must be to fight. Not tonight, but soon.’ The tremor beneath his feet steadied and became more certain. Leaving the birch, he followed it forward and left, between two boulders. Longinus’ voice sought him out. ‘Have your gods told you which side we’ll be on?’

‘Not yet. Have yours?’

‘Hardly.’ Longinus barked a short, pained laugh. ‘Mine are too busy trying to keep me alive to be concerned with minor details like which side of a foreign war I might be asked to fight for.’ He pushed himself forward as far as the boulders. ‘We should run again. Dawn is not so far and I have no wish to find out what happens if we are not back by the fire before daylight.’

‘I think we’re here. Come and look.’

Had the hound and the thrumming of the gods not guided him, Valerius would never have found the grave mound. Even standing a spear’s length from the opening, he was not certain what it was, except that he could hear voices that were not in his ears, nor even in his head, but in the far corners of his soul. They were angry, but not with him, or perhaps he was simply so used to the anger of the dead that he had become inured to the power of it. He tilted his head, trying to hear beyond the wash of noise to what lay beneath.

Longinus reached him, and regretted it. ‘Gods, Valerius …’ The Thracian had forgotten his pain. He gripped the hilt of the blade at his side, which was a good, solid Roman cavalry blade and of no

worth at all against those already dead. He took in the grave mound, and its opening. ‘It’s very small,’ he said faintly.

Despite himself, Valerius laughed. ‘The dead do not need great space.’

‘Nor light, I should think. Did you bring a flame?’

‘I did.’ Since his time in the god’s cave, Valerius had carried the means to make light everywhere; tinder and a candle and a small rod dipped in a mix of pine resin and sheep fat that flared and held a larger flame than the candle might have done. He lit it now and carried it in his sword hand, as an act of trust. ‘I won’t make you come, but I think you should.’

‘So do I.’ Longinus was hoarse with nerves. ‘I’ll go where the light goes. Just don’t let it go out.’

Longinus was right; the mound was small. Valerius crawled through an opening that would have been cramped for a child, and on through a tunnel that came out, at length, into a chamber far smaller than the one inside the dreaming mound of the ancestors on Hibernia.

His pine resin flame flickered on rock and bones and dried turf. He could feel others around him: Cunomar, the spoiled child; Cygfa, the warrior who was Caradoc reborn as woman and terrifying for it; Valerius’ own father, not Luain mac Calma, but Eburovic, master bladesmith of the Eceni, whom he had known as father for all of his childhood. Above them all, stronger, nearer, so close he could touch her, was Breaca.

She was not here. She could not be here; the space in the mound did not allow it, but she had been, and left a part of herself behind. Valerius made himself look beyond the shifting shadows to the flame and all it touched on, to the rock and old bones and mouse droppings and then, blindingly - how could he not have seen them at the start? - to the five blades that lay on ledges cut into the walls.

The pressure in his head was astonishing; not in the ancestors’ mound in Hibernia or in Mithras’ cave in the western mountains had he felt so closely the presence of the dead, or their certain intent to kill. Theirs was a serpent’s hiss that filled his mind, designed to steal his soul and drive him empty back into the night to die. Uniquely, their hatred seemed impersonal; they did not loathe Valerius for who he was or what he had been, simply for being there, and for having come uninvited.

He had been invited; he believed that with all that he knew to be true. Closing his eyes, he sought the same thread of the moon and the direction of the bull that bore the moon between its horns and found it, and stepped forward to meet what was there, less inimical than the rest.

Slowly, the world became iron, woven and beaten and woven again, and bronze molten and flowing, red as life blood, cast into the shape of a feeding she-bear that rose on her hind legs to look at him. It spoke in the voice of Eburovic, not-father to Valerius. who had spent the whole of one spring in the making of just this one blade.

Take it, blade of my soul. Keep it safe. You will know what must be done with it and when.

Through all the years of his haunting, in the uncountable taunts of the dead, Eburovic had never hated his son, nor wished him ill. Valerius asked, ‘Why now?’ and heard nothing.

‘We shouldn’t be here.’ Longinus said it, whispering. His voice was lost in the spitting havoc of the dead.

My son, lift the bear from the stone. It is yours by right.

‘You are not my father.’ It was true. When had he come truly to believe it? Sometime on Mona, when yet another dreamer had mistaken him for the Elder and regretted it after. ‘Luain mac Calma sired me.’

Nevertheless, I give you the blade of my making to hold and to keep until I ask that you relinquish it.

‘What of the others? Not all five blades were made by you.’

No, but still, they are good. Take them. In the war that is coming, they will be needed. Too few are left that carry the goodwill of the dead.

‘Valerius, we should …’ Longinus, living, was less tangible than the dead.

The ghost was the centre of the world, all-powerful and all knowing, as Eburovic had seemed to the child Ban, who grew to be Valerius. It made the salute of one warrior to another and then of the warrior to the dreamer. It formed its left hand into the crescent of Nemain, that could have been the horns of a bull, Please? It spoke, earnestly. As the one who was your father in all but blood, I ask it of you. More lives than yours depend on it. No ghost had ever pleaded with Valerius. He had been threatened, barracked, promised death and an eternity of others’ vengeance in the lands beyond life, but never had any one of them asked him for a favour.

The novelty of it shocked him, and the sudden clarity, as of fog

lifting with the dawn; this once in his life, he understood exactly what he must do - and could do it.

He said, ‘Longinus, if you trust me at all, help me carry the blades. Choose whichever suits you best, except this one, and keep it. The rest we will keep in our riding packs. Do it now, without thinking. Or if you must think, think of the Crow-horse and what it was like to ride him, not the shadows that would bring you to ruin. Think of the Crow-horse, think of what it is to hold him when he is in full flight… Good man, well done. Now follow me out. If you can run, we will run. If not, we will walk. If we are back at the fire before daylight, we will be safe.’

‘I can run.’ Longinus was behind him, step for step and breath for breath, crawling out through the entrance into the night and back down the track along which they had come. ‘You wouldn’t believe how fast I can run.’

XXXIV.

THE SOUND OF HAMMERED METAL MARKED TIME AT THE SITE OF the Eceni horse fairs. For lack of anything better to pass the time, Breaca beat out the tang of a sword blade in the new forge, built by the she bears next to the great-house.

The day was sharp with frost and potential. A brisk wind sent clouds in the shape of herons across the sky; a thrush clucked in the trees behind the forge, not quite in time with her hammer; across the clearing, six new warriors arrived as a group, bright in their blue Eceni cloaks, with the clan marks of the fox about the hems and sleeves.

Through the making of the tang, they were greeted by the she bears assigned to that day, helped to settle in the great-house, shown what food and weapons and armour was available, and showed in turn what they had brought on their pack horses, which was considerable; for a people starved through winter, the incoming warriors had brought more than any of Breaca’s group had imagined. Over the half-month since the snows had begun to melt, the stores of grain, of dried meat, of oat bannocks baked for the journey, had grown as the stocks of blades and spearheads fell.

They were not many yet, the warriors who flocked to her call, but they were the beginnings of a war host. On the day Cunomar left to take his message to Camulodunum, one hundred and eighty warriors had already gathered. By the day after, when he had still not returned, that number had risen by sixty and continued to rise through the morning.

Breaca watched as each new group were not only given weapons

and shown the beginnings of how to use them, but were also instructed in how best to evacuate the great-house. Gunovar did it, crouching on the sandy soil, drawing maps with the point of her knife and showing the waymarkers used by the she-bears: the black-painted staves and bear-claw marks slashed on trees that would show the warriors the way out of the clearing to the forest and, perhaps, back in again.