Dreaming the Bull (31 page)

The fire settled in on itself. Stinging smoke billowed. The waterfall churned in the pool and flowed on into the river. In the echoes of each Breaca heard Caradoc’s name, as she heard it daily in the clash of weapons and the screams of dying legionaries and the call of the crows on the battlefield. With time, she did not doubt that it would drive her mad.

Airmid sat opposite on a river rock with her cloak pulled up round her hair. Beads of water stood proud on it, like sweat. Her face was too thin and too grey but she would have stood out from the rest had it been any different. By night, she tended the wounded and cleared a path to the gods for the dead and dying. By day, while the warriors slaughtered the legions in Caradoc’s name, she searched the dream for ways to bring him home. Tonight, it seemed she might have found one.

To hope was dangerous. The fragile balance of Breaca’s mind depended on knowing that all hope was lost, but it was impossible not to clutch at the first thing offered. With her eyes on the fire, she said, “Tell me what you’ve seen.”

Airmid picked a damp log from the pile around the fire and laid it on the flames. Water hissed and became steam.
Through its cloud, she said, “Caradoc is in the emperor’s hands; that is beyond question. To reach Claudius, we must go through Scapula. Nothing less will touch him; that, too, we have known since the first days outside the Brigante camp. Until now, we have not found a means to come near the governor that was not a blatant, and worthless, act of suicide. Tonight, we believe he has made a mistake. Ardacos’ she-bears have been shadowing his retreat and they report that his engineers have built their marching camp over the burial site of an ancestor-dreamer.”

“Whose grave is it?”

“I don’t know. There is no standing stone, nor raised mound, but her bones and her dream-marks lie beneath the land at a crossing place of two trackways used by the ancestors. I can feel them and their anger. At any other time, it might not be of use to us, but tonight the old moon becomes new and Nemain’s powers are at their height. I believe that with the god’s aid we can enter the fort and reach Scapula.”

“To kill him.” Breaca said it flatly, not as a question.

Airmid exhaled, slowly, thinking. She rarely took time to think before she spoke in Breaca’s presence and only on matters that touched on her relationship with her god. She said, “Ultimately we will kill him, yes, but he must not die by the sword. If you are set on coming, you must swear to me that you will not cut his throat. He must die slowly, over days, or the dream will be broken and Caradoc will die at the emperor’s decree in Rome.”

Caradoc. Crucified. Cunomar, soft-haired child of the sea
…

Breaca dug her fingers into the rotting log and waited for a wave of nausea to pass. A weak, unwilling part of her
grasped at the words and held them. When she could speak, she said, “But if I don’t kill him and the dream is not broken, is there a chance that Caradoc and the children might live?”

Airmid nodded. “I believe there may be. Nothing is ever clear and this is more fog-bound than most, but, yes, I think that’s what the gods are showing me.”

It was the barest fragment of a straw in the whirlpool of her drowning, and Breaca held on as if it were dry land. She said, “Then, for that alone, I swear that I will not kill Scapula. But I will come with you. No risk is so great that it’s worth breaking the dream to escape it.”

“You must become the elder grandmother, or as close to her as you can.”

The fire was hotter, fed by dried yew and hawthorn with the berries still on the branch. The pool beneath the waterfall caught the flames and reflected them back, brighter. Between fire and water three dreamers, Airmid, Luain mac Calma and Efnís of the Eceni, made a triangle and drew the shape of the new-old moon at their feet. Breaca stood in its centre, dry-mouthed as she rarely was before battle. Beyond, Ardacos and four of his she-bears waited naked in the dark. They had washed themselves clean of woad and smelled now only of bear grease and white lime paint.

“The elder grandmother,” said Airmid a second time. “Our elder grandmother. The first and the best. You have to call her to you and take on as much of herself as she will give.”

“I don’t remember her.” Childhood was a world apart, lived by a stranger and reported only in songs. The elder
grandmother had died on the day before Breaca returned from her long-nights and became a woman. Then, her passing had seemed the worst disaster the world could offer. “I can’t even remember what colour her eyes were.”

“They were white when you knew her,” said Airmid. “She was blind and the central part was wide with white at its core. The rim around it seemed black. She will be different now. You have to call her; you were her last dream. Do you still have the stone spear-head that you used to kill the eagle in your long-nights?”

“Yes.” From her belt-pouch Breaca emptied onto her palm the cluttered treasure of her past: Cunobelin’s seal ring, given with his oath to protect her; the serpent-spear brooch she had made and whose twin she had given to Caradoc; the hare’s foot that had been Hail’s first kill for her; a lock of Cunomar’s hair woven with a strand of mane from the grey battle mare, made by her son to mark the day when he rode his first war horse. All of these were from her adult life. From her childhood, she had kept only the flint spear-head made by the ancestors that had been Bán’s gift for her long-nights.

She sifted the stone from the rest and held it out. The pale, milky flint subdued the firelight as it had always done. Smoke clung around it, making her cough.

Airmid said, “Look at the stone, Breaca. What does it look like?”

It looked like a flint arrow-head, fashioned by the ancestors. The chipped edges were as sharp as the day it had been made. Against all probability, fibres lingered on the narrowed haft where she had bound it to the grandmother’s staff to use as a spear against the war chief of the eagles. Brown bloodstains marbling the flint became redder, became
fresh blood that spread out across the blue-ridged stone. The elder grandmother said,
Welcome home, warrior,
and laughed.

Airmid said, “Go to her, Breaca; find her for me,” and somewhere, mac Calma and Efnís echoed, but their voices came late and were distant whispers from another time; the dream had already claimed her.

The elder grandmother was different, as Airmid had said she would be. The old woman had been blind in the years when Breaca-the-child had been her eyes and limbs, following in Airmid’s footsteps. The grandmother now had eyes bright as a hawk’s and as sharp. She stood upright, not stooped, and there was no pain in her limbs to prevent her from walking unaided. Her hair was silver-white and did not thin across the crown as it had. Only her face was the same, the skin wrinkled as the hawthorn berries Airmid had laid across the fire. Her eyes, astoundingly, were brown; Breaca had always imagined them grey, like her father’s.

The grandmother laughed, a sound to crawl under the skin of a child and make her search her conscience for guilt. “You should eat more,” she said. “And stop grieving. He is not dead yet, the one for whom you kill but shed no tears.”

That was unfair. Breaca had tried to weep. For nights, she had sat with the embers of dying fires, waiting for the explosion of grief that must come, as it had for Macha and her father. All she had found was a cold, limitless anger that drove her to kill and to go on killing and the despair that followed. Neither gave any sense of release.

“You grieve rightly for the dead,” said the grandmother. “It is due them and honours their passing. There is no reason to grieve for the living.”

I could not be sure he was living.
It was not true; to the ends of the earth Breaca believed she would know when Caradoc died. Aloud she said, “Is he whole and safe?”

“Who?”

“Caradoc. Who else?”

“Your son, perhaps, or the singer?” The grandmother capered, cackling. Her humour had always been terrifying. Death had not mellowed it. “Dubornos is well. He dreams of Airmid.” She grinned and cocked her head to one side, bright as a thrush. “Caradoc has not yet been harmed,” she said. “He fears for you and for your son.”

“Can we help him?”

“I don’t know. Can you? Shall we ask the gods?”

Unusually limber, the grandmother crouched on her haunches before the fire. Reaching into the heat, she stirred it with her finger. When the logs fell and resettled, she studied them, reading futures in falling ash. Nodding and mumbling, she rose and walked past a stiffly silent Luain mac Calma to wade into the river. The water was cold. Breaca had washed in it earlier. Unhesitating, the grandmother walked in until the sleek black water lapped at the sag of her breasts. Leaning forward, she breathed on the sleek mirror surface and polished it with the heel of her hand the better to admire her reflection.

“I don’t know,” she said again, more slowly. Raising her head, she looked directly at Breaca. Her eyes shone with the light of fire on water. “Would you rather have him dead and safely in the care of Briga, or alive, knowing that you would never see him again?”

Breaca stared. The words swept through her head and made no sense. She said, “I don’t understand.”

The old woman nodded. The capering lunacy of earlier was gone. She was serious as she had rarely been in life and then only in the presence of death. She said, “The future is not set, it never is. It may be that Caradoc dies but there is a chance he may survive. If he dies, you will at least know where he is. If he lives, you may not.”

“Is the choice mine?”

“It may not be. But you should know which you prefer in case you are asked.”

It was a riddle. The dreamers set them to each other in the dark of a winter’s night on Mona but the promise of life never hung on the answer, nor the gift of death.

Which is worse: to live when life is unbearable, or to die too soon while the heart-flame still burns?

Which is better: to die and escape the threatened pains of gods and men or to live to see the beauty of another dawn?

Who has the right to make the choice for another?

No-one.

The world opened at her feet and gave no answers. With the words dry as bone in her mouth, Breaca said, “I can’t choose. It’s not my place to decide for him.”

Encased up to her neck in freezing water, the elder grandmother shook her head. “Of course not. The gods decide and those whose souls are held in balance, but still they—and you—must know which you would choose. We cannot go on else.”

The night waited. Three dreamers stood around the fire who nightly crossed the boundaries between the worlds. None of them offered help, nor could she ask it.

A lifetime passed and another. She had never thought herself indecisive.
Beloved—what would you ask of me?

She did not hear his voice; she had not heard it since the day he took Sorcha’s ferry and left Mona, but the answer came none the less, with the cadence of his speech and the certainty of his memory.
I ask only that which you would want of me, knowing that I loved you.
She said, “I would want what is best for Caradoc, whether he can be with me or not. If he lives, I will get word of him and he of me. There is no-one can deny us that.”

The grandmother waded from the water. She smelled strongly of woad. “A good choice,” she said. “The pain, then, will be yours as much as his, possibly more so. But it may be that something can be returned to you. Only the gods know that.”

“How do we make it happen?”

“Follow me. Do as I do and exactly as I say. Ask no questions and trust those who walk with you, however they seem. They are the men and women you know them to be.”

The trackway lay bright in the heather, lit by a moon Breaca could not see. The flint arrow-head was hot, as if recently pulled from the fire. She held it tightly so that the flaked edges bit into her palm. The elder grandmother walked ahead, her head high, her hair alive with the same light as lit the path. Breaca came behind and then Airmid. Efnís and Luain mac Calma had remained at the fire to hold the dreaming and guide them home.

On either side, the men and women of the she-bear shuffled high-kneed through the heather. They wore bearskins in a way Breaca had never seen before: wrapped round so that man became bear and bear became man. Their eyes were small and dangerous and their breath was fetid.
Ardacos had smiled at her and Breaca had believed his teeth long and white. It was the gods’ work, clearly. The elder grandmother had grabbed her arm and pulled her away before she could ask him how it had been done.

The she-bears had been forbidden to walk on the trackway. As they came closer to the fort, they dropped onto all fours and ran on ahead towards the timbered stockade and ditch that surrounded Scapula’s marching camp.

Each Roman night-camp was the same: built in the evening and removed again the next day, leaving only stake holes, a ditch and the latrines as evidence of its presence. In their uniformity was their strength. Each man knew his place and his duties; but the enemy too, after the first few attacks, knew exactly the placement of gates and defences. The she-bears ran for the southern ditch, the one closest to the ancestor’s track. The sentries on the inside would have to be blind drunk and stupid not to smell them as they came. Breaca grasped the stone spear-head and regretted again that she had not brought her sword.

“Get down.”

“What?”

The elder grandmother hissed her impatience. “Get down, here, while they make the rampart safe. Get down in the heather and crawl.”

Breaca felt the old woman’s hand in the small of her back, shoving her down until she lay on her belly and squirmed forward like a snake. Heather roots reared up on either side, tall as corn. They scratched at her arms, drawing blood. The earth smelled of old fox dirt and the mellow, almost sweet musk of a snake. Something slid past her in the starlit darkness, dry against the skin of her
forearm. She pressed her head into the dirt, breathing through a wave of panic. Behind her she felt the elder grandmother smirk.

A man died on the southern rampart of the fort, and another. Breaca saw their souls walk ahead of her on the track, lost and alone. She would have called to them out of pity, but the elder grandmother held her mouth. Her voice was a rustle of heather. “Quiet, child. Would you have them know we are here?”