Dreaming the Bull (53 page)

“You’re not coming!”

Surprised, he looked up. His new horse was footsore and had trouble on the wet rock and turned only slowly.
Before it was fully round, he had realized that it was Cygfa who had spoken and that she was weeping. She would never weep for him.

From over his right shoulder he heard Caradoc’s voice, held unnaturally steady, say, “I can’t come. I’m sorry, truly. I can’t, not like this.” The warrior’s right arm hung at his side. It might still have movement, but it would never again raise a shield.

“You must. The warriors of Mona, of the Ordovices, of all the united tribes, will accept you, whole or not. You can still come. You must. Without you, we are nothing.” She was whispering, to get the words out past her grief. They hushed into the sea.

“No. They may accept, but they will not respect.” Caradoc spread his left hand. The fingers crooked inwards on both and they shook as one with palsy. “Cygfa, I don’t do this to hurt you, I swear it. If we were not at war, I would return without hesitation, but I can’t lead a battle as I am. Better that they know I am free and in Gaul and that they believe me whole. It will be said I stayed to fight while you escaped. Word will be spread later that I am alive and it will give heart where my presence will not. I’m sorry.” It was a prepared speech, as Valerius’ to Marullus had been. One could not tell how long ago he had prepared it.

The dreamers, evidently, expected this. Dubornos showed no surprise. Luain mac Calma took no part in the exchange taking place an arm’s length away and instead watched the skiff on one side and the battle beyond, where a line of Gauls was slaughtering the remnants of Marullus’ men.

Cygfa said, “Mother? Will you not return to your people?”

Cwmfen was behind Caradoc. Enemy blood stained her face and arms, but no tears. She shook her head. “I stay with your father. Math must grow knowing his father as well as his mother. He needs both of us to teach him who he is and what lines he has come from. It is better like this. We will hear word of you and you of us.”

“Then I’ll stay with you. I’ll guard you and my brother will grow knowing his full family.” She did not suggest that Cunomar should stay.

“No.” Caradoc reached for her arm. “You must sit your long-nights. Mac Calma says it’s not too late, but that it can’t be done in Gaul. The gods no longer live here as they do on Mona.”

Valerius watched the change in her, the sudden swamping wave of a hope that had been buried so deeply for so long that she had forgotten it was there. Her father had not forgotten, nor her mother, and nor, perhaps, had Luain mac Calma, who could see what she might have been and might yet be. The understanding of that filled her, visibly.

She glanced sideways at the dreamer, who nodded. Caradoc smiled, at what cost was not clear. “See? It is better this way. Go now. You must sail and we must ride.”

He reached for her other arm, no longer the clasp of a warrior but the full embrace of father for daughter. The careful mask of his composure broke open. Tears made clean tracks on his cheeks. His hand went to his shoulder, to the serpent-spear brooch that was all that remained of Britannia. He unhooked it and pinned it to Cygfa’s tunic. The red threads on the lower loop were entirely blackened with his blood. Kissing her, he said, “I have no blade to give you—mac Calma will see one is made for you that is fit.
Take this, and take heart. While you live, my soul and your mother’s fight the enemy through you.”

“Father…” Cygfa lifted his hand to her cheek. Through streaming tears she said, “We will drive them from the land, every one. Then you can come home again.”

Caradoc smiled brokenly. When he could speak, he said, “We will wait daily for that news.”

His gaze moved back beyond Cygfa to where Cunomar watched, forlorn, abandoned, unspeakably angry and lost. He had entered the battle a boy and emerged the same, lacking a single kill. Until Caradoc spoke, all of his attention had been on the fighting behind them. Valerius, watching, saw that Dubornos was holding the boy’s horse and that three of the blue-feathered Gauls had been ordered expressly to watch over the lad and keep him safe.

“Cunomar, you fought well.” Caradoc was more controlled now, enough to pass off a lie with some credibility. He drew the knife from his belt and held it, hilt out. “I have no sword to give you, but take this, as if it were one. Mac Calma will see it made real.” He stopped, searching for words. Those that came were not prepared. “Your mother … your mother will know this is right. Stand at her side in my stead. Protect her for me.”

He knew his son well. The boy’s face had collapsed at the sight of the knife and the hollow praise for his actions. In the name of his mother, he pulled himself together and sat straighter in the saddle. For the first time, he took his eyes and his attention completely from the fading battle at the rocks. He had been born on Mona and grown amongst its ceremony. He made the salute of a warrior to a member of the elder council, perfectly.

“While I live, she will not take harm,” he said. “In Briga’s name, I swear it.”

The gathered adults witnessed the oath with due solemnity.

Their parting was swift after that. The Gauls took the horses. The oarsmen, who were for the best part also Gauls, helped the warriors to board the skiff. Philonikos chose to accompany Caradoc and was wished well by Dubornos, who had been closest to him. The Belgic boy, wretchedly confused, was given the same choice and, perhaps not understanding, said in his fractured Gaulish that he wished to remain with Valerius, wherever he went. Where Valerius was going was not clear to any of them, least of all the man himself.

Mac Calma made the decision for him. “If you stay, our Gauls will kill you. They don’t believe me that you are not of Rome.”

“They’re right. I’m as much of Rome as any man they killed tonight.”

The dreamer smiled crookedly. “Then if you wish to die, you may stay on this beach. If you wish to live, you can at least board the boat. We have five days’ journey, perhaps more. Decisions can be made and broken a dozen times in each day, and if you really want to die Manannan will take you.” When Valerius did not reply, mac Calma said, “If you stay, the boy Iccius will die with you. I do not have the power to make them let him live.”

It was the name that made the difference, although later Valerius railed against so flagrant an abuse of his past. At the time, he knew only that he could not see the child die again whose ghost he still carried with him and so the decision was made.

“Stop.” Valerius had turned to board the skiff when Caradoc grasped his arm. It was easy now to see the man in him; the god had never looked so broken. The cloud-grey eyes were bloodshot and held a world of pain. The courage it took to keep them level could not be measured. Caradoc held out his hand. “Give me your knife,” he said.

“What?”

“Your knife. The one with the falcon head. Give it to me.”

Waves brushed the shingle. A night gull cried. An oarsman grated his blade on the sand. Slowly, Valerius drew his knife from his belt and held it out on the flat of his palm.

Caradoc touched the shaking fingers of his left hand to the weapon but did not lift it. He said, “There is a challenge amongst my mother’s people, the Ordovices, to test the truth between warriors. Two hands clasp the knife-hilt. Each strives to strike the other in the throat. Only one walks away alive.”

Valerius barked a laugh. “The Ordovices were always known for their savagery.”

“Perhaps, but it has its place. I swear to you now, on the hilt of your blade, that I did not betray you to Amminios, that I never at any time in your childhood wished you ill, that I took joy in your joy and heart in your love, that I respected the power of the dreamer you were and the warrior you could become. I would have spoken willingly before the elders at your long-nights and felt myself honoured to be asked. I still would.” Caradoc was neither a dreamer nor a singer but his words carried their power. His eyes burned. They were not the god’s eyes. In a different voice, he said, “If you doubt me, we will take the challenge. Mac Calma is not empowered by our elders to oversee it, but Cwmfen is.”

“You think she wishes to oversee your slaughter?” The mere suggestion was ludicrous. Valerius was weary from the battle, but not incapacitated. Caradoc was on his feet only because his will would not let him fall; he was in no condition to hold a knife. Valerius said, “You have the chance of life in Gaul. Do you wish to leave Cwmfen to rear a child without its father? That is not what you just told your daughter.”

“I would not have my son grow to adulthood with his father accused of treachery.”

“Worse things have been said of men.”

“Not of me.”

They stood apart on the shingle, with a knife-blade between them. Behind, the battle ended. Valerius heard a man die, and then the silence of spent warriors who will stand a while when the danger is over, until they can find the strength to walk. He had seen it on both sides, sometimes in the same day, when the battle has gone beyond the endurance of everyone left on the field and no-one can win.

Caradoc said gently, “Bán? You have to choose. You can’t go back to Breaca believing that I betrayed you.”

Your sister is my heart and soul, the rising of my sun in the morning. She has been from the first meeting and will be until I die and beyond.

The child who had been Bán had not seen that. The man who was Valerius had spent fifteen years denying it.

Valerius closed his hand around the knife’s hilt. Slowly, he removed it from Caradoc’s grip. “You think I could go within reach of my sister if I had killed you? She must have changed a great deal.”

“She hasn’t.” Caradoc smiled. “Then you believe me?”

You would believe Amminios over me?

Yes.

He could lie so well, my brother
…

“I won’t kill you to prove a point.”

Fingers stronger than he imagined closed on his wrist, crushing skin onto bone. Cloud-grey eyes burned with a fire he had thought long spent. With quiet intensity, Caradoc said, “But
do you believe me?”

The ghosts were gone. His god did not watch over him. Alone in a crowd of strangers with no-one left to help him, Julius Valerius abandoned the certainty that had sustained him since before he joined the legions.

“Yes,” he said, “I believe you.”

“It’s a ship!”

The gale whipped the words out over the sea. It caught the unbraided parts of Breaca’s hair and spread them like sea-wrack about her face. It lifted spray from the waves and dashed it onto the rocks at her feet, and over the fire, and her cloak, and her face, and she raised her arms and let it cover all of her, saltily sweet. Laughing like a child, she shouted to Airmid over the noise of the wind and the water. “Look! Near where the sun hits the sea. It’s a ship. Graine was right. It’s Luain’s ship!”

She had not believed the dream; no-one had. It had come early one morning, halfway through the first of the autumn’s storms. Graine had told it to Sorcha who had waited almost to noon before, at the child’s insistence, she had walked through the rain to the great-house and told whoever would listen. The first few had smiled and laid more wood on the fire and done nothing; a young child’s dreams are too unfocused to be true and no sane man would sail in the face of an autumn storm. Airmid alone had believed her and had persuaded Ardacos to take the
ferry across to the mainland to search for Breaca and bring her home.

The small warrior had taken three days to find the Boudica and another half day passed before she was persuaded to abandon her stalking of foraging legionaries on the strength of a dream told by the daughter she had barely seen these last two years. The promise of a ship had swayed her, and Airmid’s word that the dream was true.

Airmid had been waiting on the jetty for their return, carrying lit torches, with the horses saddled behind. Graine waited with her, standing on her own, no longer needing to hold an adult hand for support. Breaca could not remember when that had happened; sometime in the summer perhaps.

Graine was wearing a grey cloak and a small dreamer’s thong at the brow. That, too, was new. Her ox-blood hair hung in sodden rats’ tails around her shoulders, darkened to oak in the rain. Seeing Sorcha, she had run forward to be lifted and swung in the air, squealing. Set down on the ground again, she took a step towards her mother, then, faltering, looked back to Airmid for help.

“Go on.” The dreamer had smiled quiet encouragement. “Say what you dreamed.”

The child took a breath. Slowly, measuring the words, she said, “Luain-the-heron is on the boat that’s coming. He brings our brothers with him.”

It was an easy mistake. Graine was less than a quarter year past her third birthday. Her words were good, better than they had been in the summer, but they were no more precise than her dreaming. The difference between a brother and a father was not great either in dreaming or in language.

Airmid, standing behind, had shrugged. “She’s been
saying that since she first dreamed it,” she said. “I promised I’d let her tell you.”

“It’s a kind dream, thank you.” Smiling, Breaca had knelt and opened her arms. Graine came into them, shyly, as if to a stranger, and they hugged, a mess of wet wool and rain-blackened hair. Manannan, god of the sea, sent a wave to wash over the jetty and their feet. Breaca stood, lifting her daughter in her arms, and kissed the top of her head. “Thank you for coming out in the rain. If you stay here with Ardacos now, he’ll give you dry clothes and keep you warm and Airmid and Sorcha and I will ride west to the coast and see who’s on the boat. If Cunomar’s there, we’ll bring him back to you. He’ll be glad to be home, and your father with him.”

The child’s great green-grey eyes had been solemnly wide, like an owl’s. “You’re not to be angry with him,” she said. “The grandmother said so.”

Breaca could not imagine being angry. It was enough to stand on the brink of hope, like a child on the edge of a winter torrent, not daring to step forward. For nearly three years she had known that Caradoc, Cwmfen and the children were alive in Rome, but nothing more, until Luain mac Calma had read something in the flight of a heron and heard something else from a passing Greek trader and had taken a late ship for Gaul. Breaca stood now, braced against the wind, with the spray from the sea fierce on her face and hands, and felt her heart swell to bursting in her chest as the same vessel fought the swell of the waves to bring him home.