Dreaming the Bull (18 page)

The sun rested on the horizon, hurling ever deeper reds into the darkening blue. Insects in their thousands reached the height of their feeding. Airmid lit a fire and laid pine needles on it to make smoke to keep them off. Later, when that was not enough, she brought from her belt-pouch a stoppered flask and smeared the infusion it contained on herself, Breaca and Hail. The smell was of stewed fungi, as familiar a scent of summer as cut hay and mare’s milk. Long ago, in their joint childhood, Breaca had planned a gift of the same for Airmid but had been forestalled. She wanted to say so but a cramp came on her that lasted a full sixty heartbeats and she was gasping for breath by the end.

“Keep walking.”

“I can’t. She’s here, I can feel her.”

“Then come and kneel at the stakes and let me see where you’re at.”

The stakes were of ash wood, planed smooth, with the
sharp end driven an arm’s length into the ground and a spear’s height left above it. Caradoc had made them in spring before the fighting started, had spent two full days painting them that he might be with her in spirit if he could not be in fact. The eagle and the serpent-spear, his mark and hers, ran in chains along the lengths of each with the war hammer of the Ordovices and the running horse of the Eceni at either end.

Horse hides rolled with the hair outwards made a bench between them so that when Breaca knelt, leaning forward to grasp each stake and resting her arms on the hides, she made the shape of a foaling mare. From the times of the ancestors, the Eceni had given birth in this way. It made for vigorous children and, in a strong dam, ensured a fast, clean delivery.

Another wave came and passed and then another, stronger now so that she could not breathe through them. Airmid spoke from behind her.

“That’s good. The birth-sac is here.”

Strong fingers probed. Something broke within her and water gushed, hotly. The salt-sweet of birthing fluid spiked the air. Breaca said, “She doesn’t feel like Cunomar.”

“She’s a different person. Wait for the next wave and put your strength behind it.”

She did so, repeatedly, in pain and without success. Over time, the insects withdrew and the fire dulled to embers. Hail fell asleep and dreamed, twitching. The sky became a purpled bruise spreading wider until the sun gave the lighting of the world over to Nemain, the moon, who rose almost full above the top edges of the standing stones. In the centre of the circle, under the god’s light, Airmid of Nemain struggled to bring her successor into life.

“Breaca, she’s coming backwards. It will be harder than Cunomar and may take longer. If you can hold and not press, I’ll see if I can turn her. Can you do that?”

“I can try.”

A battlefield was so much easier. There, at least, she could do more than simply breathe and let the imperatives of her body clash within. She held her breath while Airmid slid a bloodied hand alongside the child and when she had to breathe, she did so in sucked gasps that did not spark the next wave of spasms. The noise of it brought Hail to her side. Laying his head on the horse-hide bench next to her arms, he crooned gently, his old eyes worried. She had no breath left to reassure him; the pressure of waiting took everything she had. In the end, she could hold no longer and the pain this time left her sobbing.

“Drink this. Drink it, Breaca. You must. We have to turn her or bring her backwards. Drink. It will help.”

Airmid was at her head, who had been behind. The world swam, nauseatingly. She felt a cup pressed to her lips and drank. The infusion was bitter and she did not recognize the taste. The hand that held her was jellied with blood and slime; her own.

Rarely, she had seen mares when the foal would not come. Macha, who had managed the births in the Eceni village of her childhood, had two responses. In those cases where the mare was everything, she had taken a blade in her cupped hand and, sliding it into the womb, had cut the living foal to pieces, that it might be pulled out and leave the mare intact. In those cases where the foal was the end of a long waiting, the result of many planned matings on whom a dynasty depended, or the dam was clearly dying, she had
taken a spiked lump hammer to the mare’s head, killing it cleanly before cutting it open to drag the foal, living, from the womb.

Raggedly, after the next wave, Breaca said, “Use the hammer. Don’t kill the child.”

“Don’t say it. We will have both of you alive.” That was the great joy with Airmid, one never had to explain. Equally, the dreamer could not hide the concern in her voice as she might have done from another birthing mother; knowing it, she did not try. Instead, she said, “I need Efnís to help. Or Luain mac Calma. Can you wait with Hail while I find one of them?” and left, because there had never been a doubt of the answer.

Pain drew her thin and compressed her again. In the midst of it were three voices and then hands on her shoulders, raising her higher. A voice rich with the accents of the northern Eceni said, “Breaca, we need you to stand. Can you do that for us? Don’t let go of the stakes, just stand upright between them so the babe points down. Hail will stay with you. I’ll move the mare’s hide out of the way.”

Another, with the faintest touch of Hibernia, said, not to her, “This one is Nemain’s child, and will come only for her light. I’ll get a bowl with water and we will give her the reflection. She will come more willingly for that. Can you keep her steady for that long?”

Time took hold of the answer and spun it out in a web of meaningless syllables, in the centre of which, like a waiting hunter, was a cracked and tearing pain. It ended, blindingly, in a wash of silver that faded into night.

Graine, daughter of Breaca, granddaughter of Graine, first-born daughter of the royal line of the Eceni, came into
life in the care of the land’s three most powerful dreamers, slipping bloody between their hands towards a bowl of tarnished moonlight. Her mother remained conscious for the birth and for long enough to walk back to the hut set apart for newly delivered women, but fell into sleep shortly afterwards, her new daughter naked at her breast. She woke once a while later and was helped out to the appointed place to pass clotted blood and mucus and the turgid mass of the afterbirth and returned to feed her child and sleep again. The infant was redly bald and bruised where the birth had squeezed her tight, and her unfocused infant gaze was the blue of the sky after rain. In her mother’s eyes, she was perfect.

“She’s ugly. Will she always be ugly? I don’t want a sister that’s ugly.”

The voice was high and peevish, made loud by hurt and fear. It broke into dreams of a future in which the children came safely to their long-nights and wore newly woven tunics, free from the blood and dust of battle. Breaca turned her head to the side. Noon sun pierced the loose thatch of the hut in which she lay, casting knife-edge shadows across the floor. Her son, thus transected, stood halfway between the door and her bed. Behind him, Airmid grimaced an apology and left.

“Cunomar.” Breaca stretched a hand to him. Graine, who had been feeding, rocked slack-jawed from her breast.

“Look, she can’t even suck properly. How will she eat when we are away, fighting the legions?”

“She’s sleeping, beloved. She can suck strongly when she wants to.” He was seven years old and had been supplanted. He was not consoled. The space between them grew desolate. She said, “Heart-of-life, will you come to me? I could get up, but it feels like a long way from here.”

She used the Eceni, which he had been learning, and addressed him as she did his father. Like a shy horse, Cunomar came forward to her outstretched hand, eyeing askance the new unwanted thing that had arrived to shake his world. Breaca tried to remember how she had felt when Bán was born, or, later, Silla, and failed. Life had been different then; a sibling always a thing to cherish. He reached her bed and stroked her hair as it fell back from her brow; his touchstone for safety.

“Hail’s here.” He offered the hound’s presence as a gift and she knew its cost. “I stayed with him through the morning like Airmid asked. He wanted to come back to you sooner but I wouldn’t let him. He’s waiting outside now. Should I call him in?”

“In a while, when I’ve had time alone with you.” She made herself smile against a sudden uncertainty. She was not alone with her son and never would be. She had forgotten how it would be, how it had been with Cunomar; until his birth, she had not known it was possible to hold so small a thing so dear. Until that moment, she had not known the terrifying, glorious truth that the part of her heart not already given to others had just split afresh in two and one part was newly installed in a separate body.

Graine woke, searching muzzily for the nipple. Cunomar tentatively touched a foot and watched its languid withdrawal.

“She’s very small.”

“Yes, but like a foal, she will grow big.”

“Not as big as me.”

“No, I don’t think so. You will always be bigger.” He was his father in all but temperament and the colour of his
eyes; he would have his father’s height. “Cunomar—” She made herself be serious. “The legions are not yet defeated. If your father and the gods work well, it may be that they will be defeated this year.” She saw his sudden panic, swiftly hidden, and worked not to show it. “Even if so, there will be more battles beyond it; the tribes south of the sea-river would welcome the legions back and they would have to be defeated.”

“So the fighting could go on for years?” The thought cheered him, visibly.

“It could. And if your father and I are in it, then we could be killed, you know that.”

“Yes.” His eyes were entirely his own, an acorn brown fading to amber. Neither parent and none of the grandparents had shared those. Now they stretched wide as he stopped thinking of himself and thought of the possibility of his parents’ death in battle. Solemnly he said, “We would sing of you for generations.” He had heard it at some fireside.

“That would be kind, but I would ask a further favour of you.” She watched him brighten, then saw suspicion creep at the margins. Before it could take hold, she said, “If we are both killed, your sister will be your closest living kin. I believe one day she will be a great dreamer, possibly of a power to match Airmid, or Luain mac Calma, but only if she grows safe to her long-nights and beyond. She mustn’t know the power she has; it would change her growing. You must swear to me on the lives of the ancestors that you will never tell her without my permission. Will you do that?”

In her own way, Breaca could make magic, if only with her son. The new sister was to be a dreamer, not a warrior, and so was not a threat. Moreover, he would be warrior to a
dreamer, as his mother was to Airmid. His feelings for Airmid were complex, but at the bedrock lay awe and a profound respect. For Luain mac Calma, he felt the fear of a child who has seen a man call lightning from the sky and believes him half a god.

His eyes were luminous, truly amber. The oath with which he swore was long and bound him absolutely in sickness, health and all manner of inebriation not to breathe a word to his sister of her possible future. He stumbled only on the child’s name, which was unfamiliar.

“Graine. It’s Graine, after my mother. Good. So then, if your father and I are killed, Graine will need someone to protect her. I could ask one of the other warriors, but it would best be her brother, who will care for her always. In the beginning, she can know that you protect her as a brother. Only later, we can tell her that you will be warrior to her dreamer. Would you pledge that for me, here, on the serpent-blade?”

His smile reflected the sun. He may have loved her and feared Luain mac Calma, but he regarded his mother’s blade with the far more prosaic worship of a would-be warrior for the weapon that will one day be his own.

It hung from a hook above the sleeping place, always to hand. She let him reach it down and lay it, sheathed, on the hides at her side. Carefully, she drew a hand’s length free so the mackerel stripes of the weld-patterns shimmered in the light. Even so little brought forth its history: the months of making by her father with her spit and his sweat melded into the metal and the score upon score of lives taken after. Cunomar gasped a child’s breath of ecstasy. Breaca, who was more hardened to the sight, felt its song weakly in the old
scar on her palm that was the relic of her first kill and warned her always of battle.

This oath was more formal. For generations, a warrior had pledged the protection of a certain dreamer with words laid down in the times of the ancestors. Breaca was speaking the phrases for him to follow when a shadow crossed the doorway. She counted five legs and wondered that Hail should be so reticent. It was not like the hound to stay silent when someone approached, unless that one could prevent him from barking a warning—or he knew such a warning to be unnecessary. A light breeze brought her the scents of horse sweat and man sweat and the iron-blood of battle and she chose not to believe it. The day was good; to hope and have that hope dashed would destroy it.

“… guard her life with mine, to the ends of the earth and the four winds.”

Cunomar pronounced the final phrases with the care of one handling the newborn. The strength of the oath and its binding altered his face, showing for the first time who he could be when grown. Breaca watched him with half an eye. Behind him, the five-legged shadow stepped into the doorway and divided: two legs and three. Cunomar heard his mother’s indrawn breath and turned, his face alight.

“You’re here!”

The young could squeal it as the grown could not. Cunomar threw himself into his father’s arms, breathlessly relaying muddled and misunderstood facts of the birth. Thus far, the magic had worked. In the presence of Caradoc, who was most certainly a god on earth, the child was no longer the supplanted favourite, but a sworn protector, charged with eternal care of his ward.

Caradoc held his son to his chest and let him ramble. His eyes asked the necessary questions of Breaca, his heart’s ease, and had them answered. In Eceni, too fast for Cunomar to follow, he said, “Airmid has told me the details of the birth but no more. I gather we have the gods and dreamers to thank that you are both alive. Is she as you dreamed?”