Dreaming the Eagle (21 page)

‘Yes!’

The word hit Luain broadside as the wave had done. He faltered and his voice stopped. Segoventos spun round, jabbing his finger like a spear in the dark. ‘Keep singing, man, it’s working.’ Then, ‘Math! Get up that mast, if you want to live. Brennos! Curo! Bind the rigging. The rest of you, get the sail into the wind. Whoever said we needed an oar to sail a ship when we have a good wind and a sail we can turn with?’ He swung back to Luain, grinning. ‘Hold tight. It’ll be a bumpy ride and you may have to swim a few strokes at the end but we’ll see your horses safely landed yet.’

The ship was a new place. Men moved who had been beaten into the timbers. The lad at the bow, a willowy fifteen-year-old with corngold hair and skin like a girl’s, scaled half the mast and brought down a snapped end of rigging.. Others lashed broken timbers in place and made new fixing points. Luain mac Calma, singing, kept hold of his rope and what solid wood he could find and stared off the side into the dark, trying to see what the master and his men had seen. The ship came under control slowly, fighting them as a bull fights a halter, but she was outnumbered and outmastered and the wind had changed allegiance, veering round to buffet his right shoulder, not his left, driving them through the waves, not across them. In a moment of relative calm, the master turned and smiled, brilliantly. ‘You haven’t seen it, have you?’

‘What?’

‘There.’ The man pointed left, swinging his arm with the swing of the ship so that his finger marked a fixed point in the dark. ‘Land.’

Luain stared where he was shown. The world was black. He kept his eyes where he thought the horizon might be, looking for the white mark of breakers on a shore to show him what the others had seen. He saw nothing.

‘Not there. There.’ The arm swung backwards, heading towards the stern. ‘Your friends are waiting. We’re half a moon early and still they’re waiting. They’ve lit us a fire.’

‘A fire? In this weather?’ Hope died in his heart. They would not be the first to drown happy, believing they were sailing to paradise. ‘Who could keep a fire alight in this weather?’

‘I don’t know. But I can see what I can see and if it’s Eburovic of the Eceni come to buy your Thessalian mare, you’ll tell him a fair price or I’ll have you tied to the masthead and give her away as a guest-gift.’

The master was laughing breathlessly, shouting orders and waving his arms and still holding on to the steering oar as if there was something useful to be gained by it. The boat shuddered and fought but she was moving west, the way he wanted. ‘If you would make yourself useful, go to the bow and be ready to cast a rope out to whoever it is that is waiting. It might be better if they see a known face early on and hail us as friends, not as slavers.’

IX.

THE FIRST OF THE MEN CAME ASHORE DEAD. BREACA WAS AT THE headland when the surf piled him in. The flaccid body surged higher with each wash of the waves until he came to rest at her feet. He was young, close to her own age, with sweeping gold hair that glimmered like cut corn in the firelight and his face was at peace, as if the ocean had sung him to sleep as it stole his air. She hooked her fingers under his armpits and began to drag him clear of the broken timbers and storm-frayed ropes that gathered at the water line. His head lolled against her hand, his skin colder than the water he had come from. She looked around for help. Eburovic was waist deep in the sea, pulling in someone else. Ban was with Hail and they, too, were dragging a body up the shore between them. She looked around for longer, darker hair, bound back by the dreamer’s thong, and saw it, a spear’s throw down the headland. She waved both arms above her head. ‘Airmid! Over here! This one needs help.’

‘Here, I’ll get him.’ ‘Tagos was at her side. He was always at her side, or just behind her whenever she turned; had been so since the day in late autumn when she and Airmid had said in public the things that before had been said only in private. Or rather, Breaca had screamed them at the packed mass of grandmothers, warriors, elders and dreamers in the greathouse, and Airmid, white and tight-lipped, had listened, pleading for calm with her eyes until she, too, had reached the point of no return and had replied with the single statement that had broken everything between them. ‘You’re not a dreamer. I can’t make it so. The serpent-spear was a warrior’s dream and one to be proud of, but if you will not come to Mona as my warrior then I will go alone.’

They had both left then, Breaca to ride the grey battle mare harder than she had ever ridden her before or since; Airmid to the deep woodland to the place where they had scattered the ashes of the elder grandmother. They had come together later and apologized stiffly, and they still shared a bed, but nothing had been the same.

In honesty, Airmid had not been at fault; every dreamer of the Eceni nation had gathered for the council that autumn and they were of one voice in their opinion that Breaca nic Graine, heir to the royal line of her people, was a warrior of exceptional skill but that the dream of the ancestors and the war eagles and the mark of the serpent-spear did not constitute a true dreaming and she had shown none of the other signs of a born dreamer. There were four hundred and sixty-three dreamers at the gathering; even had Airmid ignored the words of the gods and her own dreams to speak against the overwhelming tide, her voice would have counted for nothing. But Airmid was the one who knew of a vow, spoken aloud by the gods’ pool on a summer’s morning, and she should have known better than to name Breaca as the warrior she wished to have at her side when the call finally came to journey to Mona. The call had not come yet - they were still waiting for that - but the question had been asked and the answer given and all had been said that should not have been said in the wake of it and ‘Tagos padded at Breaca’s heels like a hound whelp, trying to fill a void that was not his to fill.

He ran to her now, skidding down the shingled slope, his face fresh in the wind, his voice eager. Grasping the lad’s ankles, he hauled him up the slope, saying, ‘Come on, he might not be dead. Let’s get him up where it’s dry.’

‘No. He’s drowned. He needs a healer, or someone to say the prayers for the dead. Get the next one, down there, can you see?’ The gale howled around them. Driving sleet made Breaca temporarily blind. She shoved the hair from her eyes with the back of her hand and pointed to where she had last seen movement. A lean figure with long dark hair like seaweed was struggling to find his feet in the racing surf. ‘There’s one out there who can stand. Go and help him. If he falls in the waves he’ll be lost.’

‘Tagos ran where she pointed. Airmid joined Breaca, taking hold of the drowned youth’s ankles, and together they dragged him, buttocks scoring the shingle, up onto the headland. The turf made a harsh, cold bed, but there was no snow as there was further inland and he was out of reach of the sea. They laid him flat and Breaca knelt at his side with her head to his chest, cupping her free hand over her upper ear to keep it from filling with rain. The rub of her hair on his skin rustled like mice in wet leaves but the gallop of his heart was not there.

‘He’s not been gone long. We need to clear him of water.’ Airmid was kneeling at his other side. She brushed his eyelashes and felt for the pulse at his throat. Something in his response gave her cause for hope. ‘If we can pour the water out of him there may be time yet.

They lifted the body between them and turned him over and a life’s worth of sea drained out of his throat and his nose. Airmid said, ‘We need to breathe for him, like you did for Hail when he was first born. Do you remember?’

Breaca nodded. ‘Of course.’ It was not something one would readily forget.

They laid him back on the grass with his face to the sky. Airmid lifted his chin and stretched out his neck. ‘Tip his head back to make a straight path for the air. Lift the weight of his chest with your breath. Like this …’

It looked easy when Airmid did it, but that was ever so. In the three years since the elder grandmother’s death, she had taken on the full mantle of the old woman’s healing. It came to her now, as the dreams did, with an easy familiarity. Breaca, for whom neither dreams nor healing were easy, knelt and placed her mouth as she had been shown over the blue and salted lips. He tasted of seaweed and fish skin and faintly, on the surface, of Airmid. Grains of sand pushed themselves between her teeth, grating along her gums. When she breathed for him, the air wheezed wetly from his nose and the sides of his mouth. His chest made no movement. She sat back, frustrated.

Airmid said, ‘Try again, harder. Pinch off his nose. You’re driving fire into wet boughs, not nursing a new flame on dry tinder.’

‘You do it.’

‘No. This one is for you.’

‘Why?’

Sometimes, Airmid could look exactly like the elder grandmother. She said, ‘Because he will not return for me. Nor for anyone if you leave it much longer. Just do it.’

Breaca bent lower and blew harder and the lad’s chest began to rise.

Airmid watched and then bent to other tasks. They worked well together, with the ease and comfort of practice and only a dull residue of pain. Breaca did what she could to light the fire in the youth’s chest while Airmid did what else was necessary to draw his soul back to his body. When his bones had been checked and his internal organs felt through his skin and none of them seemed out of place or broken, she sat at his head and began the prayer for healing in the wake of battle, which was the closest thing she knew to a drowning. Macha heard and came to sit at his feet, adding her voice so that the sound of the two together lifted over the wind and the driving lash of the storm.

Down on the beach the sea gave up the rest of its bounty. Pale echoes of men found land beneath their feet and dropped to their knees, weeping their thanks to Eburovic for the size and strength of his fire and to the gods for the size and strength of Eburovic. Soon after that, half a herd of horses churned up and out of the surf. Breaca heard Ban cry out the way he did at the beginning of a hunt and then again, shortly afterwards, in wonder and joy. This once, she ignored him. The fire she nursed was gaining heat. Under her fingers, grey skin became less grey. The mouth clamped under hers moved convulsively and the dead youth bit his own tongue. His eyes sparked open. In the flaring light of the fire, they showed a thin rim of silvered grey round a central dot as round and wide as the moon. Breaca looked into them and saw only the limitless void.

‘It’s no good. He has left us.’ She rocked back on her heels. Macha let go of her prayer and sat still near his feet.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Airmid, ask him the question.’

Airmid reached out and took hold of one sea-cold wrist. Moving her head so he could see into her eyes, she said, ‘Welcome, seaman. Would you stay here on land with the living, or shall we give you back to the sea?’

It was not a trivial question. Anyone, adult or child, who has journeyed to the gods may not be made to live against his will. Not all of them, given the choice, will choose to return to the life they have left. The youth, it seemed, might do so. Breaca felt him stir under her touch as he fought to take breath for his answer. The words rattled in his throat and were lost in a paroxysm of coughing. With Airmid’s help, she rolled him onto his chest and levered him up to his knees and waited while he retched himself clear of another life’s worth of water.

They were not alone now. Shadows gathered, hunched against the sleet, and on the far side of the headland men fresh from the sea gathered more wood to feed her father’s fire. Further back, on the edge of her vision, horses huddled in a corral bounded by a low hedge of gathered gorse, shaking water from their hides and reacquainting themselves with each other and the sense of land beneath their feet. Hail paced the perimeter of the gorse ring, giving them a reason to stay in safety. On the near side of the headland, Eburovic was coming to see her, bringing a tall, lean-faced stranger with long, dark hair, the one ‘Tagos had helped from the sea.

They stopped just behind her and a careful, resonant voice, only slightly hoarse from the swimming, said, ‘We’re all alive, even the horses. The Greylag is breaking apart on a sandbar and Segoventos will be lucky if there’s enough of her left to build a rowboat, but if you are back with us and planning to stay, we can say that the sea claimed no lives tonight.’

At the sound of his voice, Macha looked up, like a hound at the right note of the whistle. Slowly, she rose to her feet. ‘Luain,’ she said, softly. ‘Luain mac Calma. Welcome.’

It was the voice Macha used when she was with Eburovic and then only when she believed they were alone. Breaca watched her take the stranger in an embrace as close as any she had ever bestowed on Eburovic. With her father standing by, smiling his quiet smile, the tall man buried his face in Macha’s neck. His hands clasped and unclasped in the well behind her shoulder blades as if they could talk in ways his voice could not. His hair mingled with hers, black in black, both drenched by the night, and for a while it was impossible to tell which strands came from whom.

At length, they let go of each other and stood a little apart with their fingers interlinked as lovers do on first knowing their love. The man lifted Macha’s hand and kissed her fingers and let it drop away. ‘How did you know to build the fire?’ he asked.

‘Breaca had a dream.’

‘Did she so?’ He turned to look, appraising. He had the stance of a singer and the eyes of a dreamer and he knew more of Breaca than she did of him. She weathered his stare, seeing him match her against those on either side. She was Macha’s height now and they looked alike. It was her hair that set her apart from the others; even a night such as this could not soak all the red from it, and since the row with Airmid she had given up hope of earning the dreamer’s thong and begun to braid it at the sides so that she was marked beyond doubt as a warrior, not a dreamer; one upon whom dreams are thrown, not by whom they are called. His eyes bored into her and he raised his brows but he did not ask, as she had, why the gods had chosen to throw her this dream when there were others who could have understood it sooner and better so that they would not have had to risk their horses riding hard through the night to light a fire with wet wood in the teeth of a storm. Instead, he nodded, as Macha had done when she first heard of it, and said merely, ‘Thank you. We owe you our lives,’ which was not what she expected at all.