Dreaming the Bull (24 page)

Following Caradoc’s prediction, the river of the Lame Hind formed a boundary between the two armies. Fires burned through the night on the slopes on either side of its widest point. This once, there was no need for the tribes to hide their presence or position. As he had done once before, Caradoc had ordered more fires lit than there were warriors, so that the legions, seeing them, might believe they faced overwhelming numbers and lose heart. In the river valley, white water reflected star points of light and the greater orange bloom of flame. A long, narrow defile ran north-west away from the two encampments, the only route out of the valley. Passage through it was blocked by a solid rampart of oak logs and boulders the height of a man and half as much again; the barricade of the salmon-trap, reproduced in larger scale from
Dubornos’ original. Caradoc had learned a lesson from the reports of the earlier battle; no horses would jump the rampart this time to wreak havoc among the tribes caught behind it.

Both sides settled for the night. The dreamers built their own fire apart on a rocky outcrop just below the mountain’s peak. A stunted rowan drooped berries by the handful over the vertiginous fall of the slope beneath. On the flat stone at the lip of the outcrop, a vast blaze of beech wood, apple and hawthorn cracked sparks high into the night.

Two hundred singers and dreamers gathered round it. Never since the invasion had so many of those trained by Mona come together, nor with such focused intent. If it were given them, they would see the death of Scapula before the fire was lit again. Of those with greatest power, whose dialogue with the gods was most direct, only Airmid was missing. Her place was on Mona with the Boudica and the new child. Breaca had not been alone in dreaming Graine as key to the future of the tribes and the infant’s early days were guarded by all the known means. Thus Airmid’s absence was accepted, even while she was missed.

Dubornos felt her lack as he would the loss of his shield in battle. He did not work closely with her; months could go by without their exchanging a word, but he knew her presence and absence as surely as he knew light and dark, heat and cold, love and loss. It did not make his part impossible to play, but it made it immeasurably harder.

On the night before a battle that was bigger than any he had seen since the invasion, he stood before the fire with the others with whom he shared the great-house on Mona; with Maroc the Elder and Luain mac Calma, once of Hibernia,
and Efnís who had been foremost amongst the dreamers of the northern Eceni until the hangings began and it was no longer safe for him to remain there. These three were the greatest: the bear, the heron, the falcon—hunters all, with the insight that gave to their dreaming. At their sides were a hundred others who had lived and trained with them for ten years or more and were accustomed to working together. Joining them for the first time in battle were the dreamers of the western tribes, those men and women who had remained to hold safe the heart of their people in a time of ceaseless war. They came together in groups of like kind and alliances were formed or re-formed that gave strength to each that was greater than they could dream of when working in the relative isolation of the tribes.

Efnís, dreamer of the Eceni, led the gathering. Alone of them all, he had seen the faces of the three among the enemy whose deaths mattered most to the tribes: Governor Scapula, the legate of the XXth legion and the decurion of the Thracian auxiliary who rode the pied horse. So that the others might know them as well as he, he offered his memories to the fire, each bound with the hair of a red mare to sticks of green hawthorn. In the smoke of their burning, others inhaled the essences of the men they hunted, letting them settle in their minds: a flash of a face seen in profile, the particular scent of one man in battle that sets him apart from the rest, the sound of a voice raised in command, or lowered in repose, the love of a father for his son and of a man for his shield-mates, the complex loathing of one who kills to cover his own self-hate.

Nothing was clear, but there was enough of each man that, in the chaos of battle, the dreamers might find the
loosened souls of those they sought and bring them fear or despair or a slowness of reflex that would give the warriors a chance to land a killing blow. It was the best they could do and it was not perfect, but it had worked in the past and, with the gods’ help, it could be made to work again.

When it came to the last of the three, the decurion who rode the pied horse, Dubornos added his own sticks to the fire, similarly bound. He had taken four days to make them, sleeping alone with his memories of a time he would have preferred to forget, sharpening to a focused clarity patterns previously hidden in a fog of grief and anger, and then binding them with his own blood and tears to the green-cut branches of a berried hawthorn.

If there had been a way to do it without remembering, Dubornos would have taken it, whatever the cost. After the burning of the fort, when it had been clear that Scapula was going to send his forces against the Eceni, Dubornos had organized the first salmon-trap and had believed it a success. Men and women of the Eceni and the Coritani had died in their hundreds, but they had sold their lives at an overwhelming price, fighting with a savagery unknown in the history of the tribes to destroy the auxiliaries sent against them. Dubornos had wept at those losses even while his soul exulted at the victory that had sent the handful of remaining enemy back to the fortress bearing the bodies of their fallen officers across their saddles. In the days immediately afterwards, before they had understood the nature and unthinkable extent of Scapula’s reprisals, his only disquiet, his single gnawing doubt, had been the frisson of raw hatred he had felt from the junior officer who had seen the danger of the salmon-trap and had later led the horses in over the
barricade to save his surviving comrades, riding at the front on a pied horse that killed as savagely as any warrior.

Dubornos had seen the horse long before he took notice of the man. When the auxiliaries had abandoned their mounts and fought on foot, there had seemed a good chance that the beast might be captured and brought into the breeding herds. Later, seeing it ridden, the regret at its loss had been greater. Only afterwards, when the hangings of the villagers began, had the temperaments of both beast and rider become clear. Dubornos’ one source of solace in the time of desolation and despair after the atrocities was that he had not instilled such unremitting hatred into Mona’s horse herds. In the making of his memory-sticks, he had bound the horse as closely as the rider, merging both into a single entity and marking it as evil.

He leaned forward and placed the last branch in the heart of the blaze. Wizened berries shrivelled and burst. Flames wrapped the skin of his forearm and he felt no heat. The fire consumed the wood and hair, sending his memories to the gods and the waiting dreamers. There were few words that could do justice to the evil he felt from this man but he gave them as well, to flesh out the picture.
He is tall and lean and his hair is black. He rides a pied horse that kills as he kills. With his own hands, he killed the children.

Sighing, two hundred dreamers took in his words and gave them life. The air around the outcrop shivered in the heat. With smoke in their hearts and flame scalding their skins, the dreamers of Mona and the west drew a collective breath and, with it, began to bend their minds to vengeance.

Dawn broke behind them, cold and clear. The dreamers’ fire died to glowing ash and the two hundred dispersed,
scrambling down the mountainside to find and wake their warriors and give them the gods’ good will before battle. Dubornos sought the largest of the warriors’ fires and found it at the northerly end of the ridge above the waterfall that marked the broadest point of the river. Here, the honour guard of Mona had slept, sharing the fire with Caradoc and his Ordovices.

Men and women were waking, stretching sleep from cramped muscles, rubbing heather dew on their faces or seeking out the small streams that tumbled over the rock-strewn slope. A few slid down through the scrub towards the midden trenches. Others had clearly been awake longer. Ardacos, who led the warriors of the she-bear and was the left arm of the Boudica’s honour guard, crouched to one side near a blackthorn thicket with a dozen of his band. They smelled strongly of woad and bear grease and grey symbols swirled on their naked bodies, the result of half a night’s painting. The hafts of their spears were made of white ash, dulled almost to black by the blood of a bear, the blades were leaf-shaped and longer than any others on the field, and undyed heron feathers dangled from the necks. They pressed handprints in white clay on their shoulders and reaffirmed battle oaths to each other in a language that Dubornos, master of eight separate tongues and a dozen dialects in each, had never heard.

Beyond the she-bears, Braint, the young woman of the Brigantes who led the centre of the honour guard in Breaca’s absence, bound the skull of a wild cat into the mane of her horse. Closer to the fire, Gwyddhien, who led the right flank, painted the mark of the grey falcon on the left shoulder of her battle mare above the serpent-spear of the Boudica. It
was she whom Dubornos sought. He scuffed down through the tangling heather and stood nearby, waiting.

Of all her people, Gwyddhien was the most striking. Always tall, the war-knot of the Silures tied in her black hair made her taller. Her skin was smoothly brown with few scars and none of them about the face. Her cheekbones were high and set wide, as was the way with some of the western tribes in whom the blood of the ancestors ran clear. One could easily see why another might find her attractive.

The woman finished and looked up; she had known he was there. Dubornos gave the warrior’s salute and said, “Airmid sends you her heart and soul for the duration of battle. She walks where you walk and dreams as you dream.”

It was the formal greeting between lovers when circumstances forced them apart in times of war. For a moment, Gwyddhien became less the warrior and more the woman. Her eyes were the greyed green of old hazel leaves made brighter by the frost of the dawn. When she smiled, they sparked as if struck by flint and iron.

“Thank you.” Her salute was that of a warrior to her dreamer when the latter is of highest rank. It honoured Dubornos, intentionally. “Is Breaca well?” she asked.

He would have left but could not; custom demanded that he answer. “She thrives, and the child with her. Her greatest regret is that she cannot join the battle.”

“But she sends her other child to take her place and thus deprives you of the chance to fight.” Gwyddhien’s brows arched enough to make the statement a question without impugning its wisdom.

“Cunomar?” Dubornos grimaced. “No. Breaca would have stopped him from coming but Caradoc had already
said he could accompany us. He felt guilt, I think, at the amount of time he had spent with Breaca and the new babe and then that he had given his mother’s swan-hilted blade to Cygfa for the battle. He had to give something to Cunomar of equal worth, and permission to join him today was the only thing that would serve. The boy chafes at the bridle like a yearling that wants to race before its bones are set.”

“He thinks the war will be over and he will have won no honour to match his parents’. In his place, I would feel the same.”

“Maybe. But I think in his place you would have listened to your elders.”

She stared at him, nodding. “As you did at his age. Or older?”

On the eve of battle, the past took root in the present. The breath soured in Dubornos’ throat. He would have turned away but Gwyddhien took hold of his shoulder and held him still, facing her. If he chose, he could read compassion in her gaze, or pity. Very badly, he wanted neither.

Gwyddhien said, “Airmid sent you with the message for me. That should be proof enough that she holds none of your past against you.” And then, when he made no reply, “You should talk to her about it sometime.”

“As she has talked to you.”

Gwyddhien shrugged. “Of course. Did you think she would not? You are the foremost singer of Mona, she one of the strongest dreamers, and yet you speak only when the need is overwhelming. The distance between you has been clear from the day you first came to the island. I asked about it only before the invasion, when it was necessary to know on whom we could truly rely. She named you as one
of those whom she trusted most closely and, having seen you in her company, I questioned it. Even knowing the whole story—particularly knowing the whole story—there was no possibility I would think less of you for it.”

“Why not? I do.”

“I know. That’s why we’re speaking of it now. We all make mistakes in our youth of which we are ashamed. The difference is that the rest of us can forgive the ignorance of the child we were and believe in the honour of the adult we have become. You were fifteen years old when Amminios’ eagles ambushed Breaca and your people in the valley of the Heron River, you had barely passed your long-nights and had never seen battle. Warriors with more kill-feathers than any died that day. Breaca’s father was one of the Eceni’s foremost warriors and they cut him down like a hunted deer. Your father was injured, ’Tagos lost an arm and Bán was killed and his body taken; Breaca herself was lucky to come out alive. The gods guided you then as they guide all of us, always. If you had not feigned death, you might well have died with the others.”

‘But at least I would have died with honour.”

Gwyddhien looked beyond him down into the valley to where the river ran cold and white. She chewed on her lower lip in the way Airmid did when she was thinking.

Presently, she said, “It might do you some good to think how many battles you have fought since that day with exceptional honour, how many lives you have saved, how many others have relied on your strength and your presence in the worst of times. You have been central to so much. If the gods had wanted you dead, you would be dead. They do not and you should care about that if you don’t care about yourself. You carry your shame into battle and it changes who
you are. One day, it will slow you when the enemy is fast. I would prefer that not to happen. As would Airmid.”