Dreaming the Bull (3 page)

The dance throbbed. The drums tugged at her soul. Waves of passion, of regret, of love and loss and pity scored her heart. Fighting for outward calm, she said again, “Warriors of the she-bear. Can you do this? Will you do it?”

A single bear-robed figure shuffled forward. It could have been man or woman, both or neither. In a voice Breaca had never known, it said, “We can. We will. We do.”

“Thank you. May Nemain light your way, may Briga aid your fighting and the bear guard the honour of your dying. I am grateful—truly.”

The last sentence was hers alone, not given by the generations before. Breaca stepped sideways, leaving open the place before the fire.

On a soft, husking cough, the skull-drumming stopped.
The circle opened and disgorged into its centre a decurion of the Roman cavalry and two of his auxiliaries. As if under Roman orders, the three marched to stand before the fire.

The officer stood a little ahead of his men and was more richly dressed. His cloak was a deep liver red, striped at the hem in white, and his chain-mail shirt caught the moonlight and made of it stars. His helmet gave him a little extra height, but did not bring him close to the stature of the two warrior-auxiliaries who flanked him, each a hand’s length taller. Beneath their helmets, the face of each was painted in white lime; circles around the eyes and knife-straight lines beneath each cheek made them other than human. All three smelled, overpoweringly, of bear grease, stoat’s urine and woad.

They made a line before the fire. Each bowed a little and gave something himself, or herself—at least one of the disguised warriors was a woman—to the flames. The offerings flashed as they burned, giving off the greens and blues of powdered copper and the whiff of scorched hair. When the fire was quiet, all three turned and lifted their cavalry cloaks so it might be seen by their peers that, beneath the chain mail of their disguise, they were naked and that the grey woad that was their protection under the gods coated all of their skin. A small incision on the left forearm of each bled a little into the night, black against the silvering grey. The skull-drums chattered a final time in recognition, approval and support. When they stopped, a measure of magic departed the night.

It was hard to move, as if the earth had become less solid a while and, returning, the pressure of it bruised the soles of the feet. Breaca moved further away, giving room before the fire to the drummers and dancers; they had
further to return and would feel the strangeness more strongly. The enemy decurion followed her.

“Am I Roman?”

The man tipped his head slightly, and by that, by his voice and by his lack of height, Breaca knew him. She smiled. “Ardacos, no, no-one could imagine you Roman. But by the time the enemy are close enough to realize it, they will be dead.”

She laid her palm on the hilt of his sword, the only part of him another could touch without desecration until he had killed his foes or died in the attempt. “You know that if it were possible, I would go in your stead.”

“And you know that there are some places where the Boudica excels and others where the she-bear is all that will suffice.”

Behind the skull paint, Ardacos’ eyes were bright as the stoat’s that was his dream. He had been her lover for a while between Airmid and Caradoc; he knew her as well as any man, knew the weaknesses, real and imagined, that she took pains to hide from the greater mass of warriors.

He said, “I couldn’t lead the warriors down the hill tomorrow if their lives and mine depended on it. I couldn’t stand with my back to the sunrise and speak to them with the voice of Briga so that they believe themselves touched by the gods and fit to defeat any number of legions. I couldn’t dream of riding alongside Caradoc in battle, weaving the wildfire so that the weak and the wounded find new heart and can fight where before they thought themselves dead.” Less soberly, he said, “The gods give to each of us different gifts. I could not be the Boudica, but also I do not wish it. You should not wish yourself a she-bear. Be grateful you
don’t spend your life with the stink of bear grease in your nostrils.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Do you think I don’t?”

“No. You think you don’t, and I know you don’t know the first part of it.” He grinned, showing white teeth. He, too, was forbidden to touch anyone but those with whom the night’s oaths had been spoken until at least the first of the enemy was dead. Deliberately, he kept his hands folded across his sword belt. “We must go while the night is still with us. The Romans are soft and they drink wine in the darkness to give themselves courage.” More formally, he said, “Be of good heart. We cannot fail.”

“And if you do, the bear will take you.”

“Of course. It is the promise we make. But it is made gladly.” He turned, sending his cloak spinning. “Wait by the fire. We will return not long after dawn.”

The air stank of woad and bear grease and thus of conflict. For a child conceived in battle and born into war, it was the familiar smell of childhood, as common as the scent of roasting hare, if less pleasant. Cunomar, son of the two greatest warriors his world had ever seen, clung to the mane of his mother’s grey battle mare and tried, surreptitiously, to breathe through his mouth. His mother’s arms kept him safe on the horse’s neck in that place, ahead of the saddle, where brave children rode if they were good and did not ask too many questions of those preparing for war.

It was hard to be good. The night had been alive with a shimmering danger and few of the adults had time for a child. Only Ardacos had said good things but then he had needed to begin his ceremony and when he had finished, the man who emerged was somebody else.

Cunomar liked Ardacos. One of the child’s earliest memories was of the small, dark-skinned warrior with the creased face bending over him in firelight, signing with his fingers the wards of protection before lifting him and
carrying him away to hide in the dark of a river valley where they lay together under the hanging boughs of a hazel tree with running water at their feet and boulders on either side for protection. Cunomar remembered little else but that the night had been unusually long and rain had fallen through most of it, masking the sounds of fighting so that he could not tell how close the enemy had come, or how sorely the wards had been tested.

Ardacos had been the real protection, greater than the wards. He had crouched next to Cunomar through the night with his battle knife drawn; together they had listened to the sounds of killing. When dawn came, the little man had walked soft-footed into the rain and returned with the newly severed head of an enemy soldier, to prove it was safe to come out. It was then Cunomar had decided that when he was older, he would be a warrior like Ardacos and would fight under the mark of the she-bear, coating himself in bear’s grease and woad that the enemies’ eyes might not see him, nor their blades bite.

In the year since, Cunomar had learned to recognize the distinctive patter of claws on a skull that called the warriors of the she-bear to the start of their ceremony. He had watched exactly how the little man mixed white lime with river clay and used it to make his hair stand up on his head so that he seemed taller and more fierce, and how he painted rings round his eyes and lines on his cheeks in the shape of a skull to warn his foes of impending death. The result was terrifying and Cunomar was not surprised that the enemy fell dead before the warriors of the she-bear. The only surprise was that they kept coming back and had not yet learned to return whence they came and leave for ever the land that was not theirs.

They would do so soon, everything and everyone said so. The promise had been heard daily through the summer in the quiet talk of warriors preparing for war and in the certainty of the dreamers, only now the woad said it in a way that could not be ignored. After a while, when the stench of it seemed less overpowering, Cunomar realized the extra sharpness was of the stoat, which was Ardacos’ dream, and that the bear-warrior had mixed it in to make him stronger.

Even without that, Cunomar would have known that this battle was going to be greater than the ones that had marked the high points of his life so far. Alive with a gilded pride, he had heard his mother speak to all those gathered on the hillside. As a cold dawn sharpened the air and Nemain, the moon, lowered into her bed in the mountains, Breaca had stood on the back of her mare and addressed the massed ranks of warriors and dreamers, naming them all Boudegae, bringers of victory, and swearing before them that she would fight for as long as it took to rid the land of the invader.

She had seemed truly like a goddess then; the mist had parted and the first slanting rays of the sun had lit her from behind, melding her with the battle mare so that two became one, a thing greater than either apart. The light had burnished her hair, making copper of the flaming bronze, casting in relief the warrior’s braid at the side and the single silver feather woven within it that marked the scores of the enemy who had died at her hand. The serpent-spear on her shield had glistened wetly red, as if freshly painted with Roman blood, and the grey cloak of Mona had lifted behind her in the wind. At the end, she had raised her blade high, promising victory, and there was not one among those gathered who doubted they could achieve it.

They had not cheered for her because the enemy was too close and might be alerted but Cunomar had seen the flash of a thousand weapons raised in salute. He had ached with pride but this time, perhaps because he was older and understood more, he felt the knifing pang of a new fear that had nothing to do with the possibility of his mother’s death or even the closeness of war but was rooted instead in the awful possibility—even the probability—that the fighting might be over before he was old enough to join it.

Watching the warriors begin to disperse, he had prayed silently to Nemain and to Briga, her mother, and to the soul of the she-bear that the war into which he had been born might not end before he was of an age to carry a weapon and win honour for himself and his parents.

Cunomar pushed himself back against his mother’s chest until the links of her mail shirt pressed cold on his neck and he felt the shivered thrill of danger. Grinning, he looked around to see who he might share it with. Airmid, the tall, dark-haired dreamer who held half of his mother’s heart, stood on a rock to their left but she was lost in the world of the dream, her face still and her eyes fixed on a horizon that only she could see. Efnís, a dreamer of the Eceni, and Luain mac Calma, the Elder dreamer who journeyed often to Hibernia and Gaul, were near her but both were similarly preoccupied. Each was too distant and too intimidating to share a child’s morning joy.

More promisingly, a few paces to the right was Cygfa, his half-sister, who sat astride the neck of the great chestnut horse that had once belonged to an officer in the enemy cavalry and was now their father’s war mount. Caradoc himself was turned away, speaking to a woman who stood on
his sword side, but his shield arm held his daughter to his chest, loosely, because she was eight years old and could manage the horse well enough on her own, but distinctly, so that everyone could see that Caradoc, war leader of three tribes, honoured his daughter in the time before battle.

Cygfa wore a torc in woven gold around her neck, a gift from a chieftain of the Durotriges who was one of his parents’ allies, but it was the stolen legionary dagger in its enamelled silver scabbard dangling at her hip that Cunomar coveted most. Turning, she saw him and grinned. He scowled back, dramatically. He had recently begun to understand that his sister was more than twice his age and would therefore become a warrior before him, but he could not accept at all that she should carry the spoils of victory when he could not. Forgetting what good children did, he raised his head and wriggled round to tug at the front of his mother’s cloak.

“Mama, when the enemy are all slain, can I have a—?”

Her fingers tightened on his shoulder and for a joyful moment he thought she had heard him and was about to promise that the sword of the enemy general would be his when she returned. Then he looked up into her face and followed the line of her gaze down into the valley to the place where the parting mist gave up a figure, and then another, both coated in iron-grey woad-grease with lime stiffening their hair and painted in white rings round their eyes. They carried something heavy between them and left it at the bottom of the hill. The smaller of the two ran forward alone.

Cunomar let go of his mother’s cloak and pointed. “Ardacos,” he said distinctly. “He has killed the enemy.”

“We can pray so.”

Ardacos was one of his mother’s closest friends.
Cunomar knew that she feared for the bear-man and tried not to show it. Breaca spoke to the battle mare and they walked a few steps down the slope. The mare was old but she came alive when the woad spiked the air. She walked forward lightly, as if ready to run. At a rocky outcrop, screened by a straggle of rowan and hawthorn, they stopped. Ardacos loped up the slope towards them.

“It is done.” Breathless, the little man gave the salute of the warrior first to Cunomar and then to his mother. The lined skin of his face was smoothly stiff beneath the white clay paint but his eyes were fired with exultation and only a small measure of pain. In answer to Breaca’s unspoken question, he said, “There were eight of them, all thick with wine and afraid of the night. Only one fought well. We lost Mab but the beacon is ours.”

“And the others? Do we have the whole chain?” Cunomar heard a tension in his mother’s voice that made his stomach lurch and left his mouth dry.

Ardacos said, “We do. The dreamers and the gods were good: the mist cleared for us when we needed it. We raised a torch and saw it returned with a second to show that the chain is whole. We have every beacon from here to the coast. When the governor’s ship leaves harbour, we will know of it. However good a general his successor might be, he will still sail in to find the country ablaze and his armies in flight and it is Roman work that will have made it possible. We will turn every one of their weapons against them, as we turn their horses, their armour and their blades.” The little man grinned, cracking the ring of paint around his mouth. “To this end, I have a gift for the warrior-in-making.”