The Boar Stone: Book Three of the Dalriada Trilogy (6 page)

Her mouth tightened. ‘They’re the biggest hills I’ve ever seen.’

Grinning, he threw himself down beside her. ‘Aw, Tiger, don’t grimace at me like that. It squeezes your pretty face up.’

She whacked his arm. ‘And
don’t
call me pretty!’

While she dug about in her lap for more berries, Cian faintly shook his head. It was a mystery to him why she thought herself so ugly. He found her appearance – her ebony hair, crystal eyes and marble skin – both startling and unnerving. What was more, a certain untouchable air about her, a sense of being lost in her own world, somehow kept all the men away. To his surprise, he found himself hoping she kept that knack. Too many things had been spoiled by associating with him.

Uncomfortably rubbing the back of his neck, Cian pointed past the bare, hunched trees along the river to the northern hills, their crags already dusted with snow, slopes red with dying bracken. ‘We can’t go dead north any more because we’d have to climb those
hills.
The road to the Wall forks left and west over the pass, or right and east. We are going up the west side, which is better, as on the east we’d be closer to the Painted Men.’ He scrubbed his stained fingers on the grass.

‘Painted Men?’ she repeated. The edge of her mouth was stained with blackberry juice, like a child’s.

‘You haven’t been listening, have you, Tiger?’ He held up one purple finger. ‘First history lesson: the Emperor Hadrian built the Wall across Britannia to keep out the tribes of Alba in—’

‘Two hundred and fifty years ago,’ she interrupted crisply. ‘I looked after my master’s boys, and they had a Greek tutor.’

He saluted her with a finger to his brow. ‘Then you’ll also know that some of the men up there in Alba – only in the east – are tattooed all over with blue markings.’

‘Blueskins?’

‘Yes, but the Roman nobility, the learned types, call them Picts. Painted Men, see?’

Minna hooked her arms around her legs, the trousers grubby at the knees. ‘And you’re Roman nobility, I suppose?’

Her words stabbed right through him. ‘Oh, yes, of course,’ he shot back. ‘It is the greatest empire in the world, after all: wine, wine and more wine.’

She snorted, because she must have seen he didn’t drink wine. ‘Have
you
gone north of the Wall, then?’

He shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Of course. There are outpost forts there for the
areani.
They are the scouts that patrol the borderlands and keep the tribes under the thumb of Rome.’

She went still at that. ‘But aren’t you afraid to go among the barbarians? They attack the Wall, don’t they?’

‘The western tribes of Dalriada have treaties with Rome.’ His lip lifted ever so slightly. ‘The Picts don’t, but you just take your chances with them.’

‘But they go about naked, my brother said, covered in bloody furs with hair grown to the ground, and they spawn children together, all the men with all the women, and they eat raw meat—’

‘Gods, Tiger! You’ve been listening to too many stories from people who have never set a toenail north of that Wall.’ Her words triggered a surprising bleakness in him. He gazed over the river, where wisps of mist were curling up from the dark water, winding about the bare alder branches. The lonely cry of geese floated over the marsh beyond, wings black against the pink sky. ‘Everyone is the same everywhere, and none of it any good,’ he muttered. ‘I’ve seen more of life than you. There’s only one person you can rely on, and that’s yourself. I have no loyalty to anyone. I look after me, and me alone.’

There was a pause. ‘That’s a foolish thing to say,’ she whispered.

The murmur of pain was there between them again: from him, her or both of them, who knew? He often glimpsed it bared in her face, because she hadn’t learned to hide it yet. But now, when she turned those unearthly eyes on him, he could swear she saw right into
him
, too, stripping away all the masks. His throat closed over with fear.

‘It’s not,’ he returned harshly, ‘it’s reality.’ He leaped up, brushing himself down briskly. She was staring at him, and so he deliberately breathed out and veiled his eyes with a smile. ‘That’s why this life suits me, see?’ He took a few steps and flipped over into a handstand, balancing there on his palms in the damp grass. ‘I drift around on the wind, wherever it takes me. And if I trip, I look down …’ He righted himself, landing neatly on his feet, ‘and there
I
am to catch me. Just me.’

Minna was regarding him warily now. He threw himself back down. ‘Oh, come on,’ he prodded. ‘You are a girl who relies on her own wits, aren’t you? You were running away, after all.’

She stiffened, turning away to the streambank. ‘I am running
to
something, not away.’

Cian stared at the curve of her cheek. She’d never offered anything of herself, and he didn’t know why she did now.

‘My brother joined the army on the Wall. And my grandmother …’ She pressed her hands into the cleft between her knees. ‘My grandmother got sick and she’s … not here any more. Broc, my brother, doesn’t know she’s gone, so I have to go to him now.’

‘
Live
with him?’ Cian determinedly shut out the weight of her grief. ‘But he’s in the army.’

‘The families of the soldiers live in the
vicus
at each fort, you told me.’

His brows drew together. She
was
running away from something, whatever she said. ‘And you have some plan of what to do when you get there, assuming you can find him?’

She braced herself and turned, defiantly lifting her chin. ‘I’m going to become a shopkeeper or learn a trade. I can make honey and herb-simples, even teach children grammar. I’ll get a little stall, and sit out the front like the butchers’ wives and make
my own money
.’ Though she spoke as if she’d rehearsed this, her face was wan and lost.

This was too much for Cian. ‘Good luck to you, then,’ was all he could think to say.

He got up and held out his hand for her to take. After a moment of looking, she did. Cian was tall for twenty-one but Minna almost came up to his collar-bone – no fragile child, but a woman with braced chin and stiff shoulders, whose luminous eyes held secrets like his own.

His breath stirred the black hair at her brow, and he reached for the horse’s bridle, clinging to the reins.

That night, after the voicing of her desperate plan, Minna heard a voice in her dreams.

Who are you, Minna-girl
? it crooned.
Who are you
? Stirring, she felt fingers caress her face just like Mamo did: along one cheek with her palm, then the other with the soft back of her hand.

She woke abruptly in the darkness of Letitia’s tent. There was no one there, apart from the old woman snoring and snuffling in her smelly hides. Shivering, Minna got on hands and knees and crawled to the tent flap, huddling there. Outside, the sky was growing lighter grey over the black northern hills. Frost sheened the ground with white.

North.

Away from the villa with its moonlit fields of barley and hooting owls, the stream with the singing frogs, and the little house beneath the ash tree. She wrapped her arms tight around her thighs and pressed her face into her knees, grinding her eye sockets into flesh and bone.

Forcing her ribs hard against her heart.

Chapter 6

B
y the time they neared the Wall, Minna kept her feelings contained to an even more narrow place inside, allowing out only impatience. But the pressure was there beneath the surface, strangling her. She could not keep it at bay much longer.

They reached Luguvalium, the old Roman fortress and town, three weeks after leaving Eboracum. From a meadow to the south, Minna gazed at the ruins of its now disused stone fort, the twin forks of shining river and the mossy town walls. But then her attention was arrested by something far more exciting.

She could see the Wall.

An enormous, dark snake of stone, it wound across her field of vision as if uncurling from her dreams, driving in from the east and crossing the river, marching relentlessly for the coast. It was taller and grimmer than even she could have imagined, a stern slash dividing the green land – a line gouged by an Emperor’s pen on a map. An edifice that said,
‘This side, in here: that side, out there
.’

Barbarian lands. Wild lands. Outlands. Minna had heard Alba called all these things. Mamo had called them simply the old lands, but even that conjured up a scent, a shiver, of something ancient and untamed. Her mouth dropped open and her heart began to race.

She was so taken away she did not at first recognize the shouts being passed back along the line of carts. The troupe would stay at Luguvalium for two weeks. As soon as the wheels rumbled to a halt, she jumped down and ran to Cian. ‘I can’t wait here for that long!’ she cried. ‘The weather is getting worse and I have to get to Broc. Don’t you know where the
areani
are posted?’

Cian pulled up the pony’s head from its feed-bucket, as all around them mules were unhitched to be watered, and people bustled about stretching their legs and unpacking. ‘Probably in the Cocidii outpost fort north of the Wall. You’d need to send a message, then cross over at Banna.’

‘Cross … the Wall?’ Minna was aghast. Her entire life she’d been told that the Wall repelled the murderous, barbarian hordes. And now he was talking about crossing into those wild lands as easily as walking out of the villa gate.
The other side.
But she had no choice. She had to get to Broc. He was all she knew, all she had left.

‘I have to go right now.’ Her voice quavered.

‘Not so fast, Tiger!’ Cian raised one hand. ‘You can’t travel on your own – you’d get eaten alive. Just send a message to your brother. I’m sure he can come for you.’

She tucked her cold fingers under her arms, stricken. Now she was so close, she had begun to remember the hard expression on Broc’s face when they argued.

Cian was looking at her shrewdly. ‘You never told him you were coming, did you?’

She turned her head to avoid those vivid blue eyes. What was the point of lying now? ‘No,’ she answered in a low voice.

Silence fell. When she dared to glance at Cian again his face bore an unfamiliar expression as he slowly rubbed the back of his neck. At last he put his hands on his narrow hips with a casual shrug. ‘I … ah, I suppose I could take you. It’s not that far.’

Minna blinked. ‘
You?
’

He smiled wryly. ‘Look, I’ll take you only because I need to go there anyway. I left some money at the Cocidii fort with an old friend, and I was going to pick it up before winter. And it’s not so bad. The tribes on this western coast are trussed up by treaties. Traders and whores go back and forth across the Wall here all the time.’

She hardly heard any of that, insensible with relief. Impulsively she clutched at his arm, holding it as if she were drowning. ‘Gods, thank you! That’s … so
kind
.’

At her touch he went still, then the muscle under her fingers moved as he slowly disentangled himself. ‘All right, come on,’ he said gently. ‘Don’t embarrass me now.’

She released him, flustered and annoyed at herself. There was no soft Mamo now with whom to lay down her head and weep.

As she walked back to the cart she slowly exhaled. All that mattered was that the last thread of her family would soon be there to cling to. Perhaps then all this darkness would dissolve, like a dream upon waking.

‘If yer brother kicks ye out on yer bony rump, come back!’ Letitia cried, as Minna donned her pack the next day, leaving the troupe camped on the town meadow.

‘She’s made more money from you in two weeks than in her last two years,’ Cian muttered, striding along the path away from the river. ‘You should have taken it, stupid.’

Minna already felt lighter. ‘I didn’t want the money. The shelter was enough kindness for me.’

‘You won’t make much of a living if you go around thinking that.’

She glanced at him, wrinkling up her nose. ‘And don’t call me stupid.’

Cian stifled a grin and cuffed her on the shoulder as if she were a puppy.

A road ran parallel to the Wall, and they took this as it unrolled eastwards over the hills, sharing the trail with traders and wagons, families trudging on foot and riders trotting briskly past. To their left the Wall snaked away, unbroken across the bare northlands, the grasses burnished by the morning sun. Minna could not stop gazing at it. As high as two men, its grey stone had been levered from the same crags that thrust up through the ridges of heath, making it look as if it were cunningly built by gods, not man. Watchtowers and small forts were set at intervals all along. If she narrowed her eyes she could glimpse the figures of men pacing on top, watching the north.

It soon rained, veiling the land in curtains of grey. Water trickled down Minna’s cheeks and under her cloak, beading her eyelashes, soaking her boots. But the next day the clouds cleared and she stopped watching the road, her attention caught by something else that made her raise her head from her feet. It was the air.