Dreaming the Eagle (22 page)

The youth was coughing again. Breaca bent to help him and so caught the moment when he turned fully to life. He smiled at her, a flash that came and went like a leaping fish and made them conspirators together against the dark, then his gaze slid past her to Luain mac Calma, the merchant who was far more than a merchant, and suddenly he was not a youth part-drowned on a headland, but a warrior and perhaps an enemy. He took no trouble to hide what he felt and she was battle-trained. In the troubled, angry eyes she read recognition and the memory of betrayal and a sudden decision, so that when he bunched himself tight and rolled to his feet and would have grabbed for the blade at her back, she was already up on her feet and back and out of reach.

‘There now.’ Her blood raced as it had not done since the Trinovantes had galloped on the roundhouse. ‘Is that any way to thank those who have saved you?’

The lad shook his head, not trusting himself to speak. The others made a ring round them; loosely and perhaps not by design. He stood on the balls of his feet, streaming water from tunic and hair and shivering like a child under the lash of the rain, and yet, without doubt, he was a warrior of a calibre to match her father, who was the best Breaca had ever known; family pride would not allow that he might be better. Each weighed the space between them and the chances of success and neither chose to test the other. His eyes granted a half-apology and swung sideways, raking the length of Luain mac Calma. ‘You sang the song of soul-parting,’ he said. ‘You are not a merchant.’

‘And you joined me.’ Mac Calma nodded, carefully. ‘So we are neither of us exactly what we seem - Math of the Ordovices.’ He spoke it in a different tone, weighting the name with a singer’s emphasis, and it gave Breaca the piece she needed to make the whole. If he was not Math of the Ordovices, then she knew who he was and with the knowledge, god-given, came the certainty of what she must do.

Drawing her blade from her back, she held it across her hands in a gesture recognized from one coast to the other as the pledge of honour between warriors. Remembering the teachings of the elder grandmother on the ways by which a member of one royal line should address another, she said, ‘Caradoc, son of Ellin of the royal line of the Ordovices, son of Cunobelin, Sun Hound of the Trinovantes, spear-bearer of three tribes, you are welcome in the lands of the Eceni.’

She had expected a nod, a smile of recognition, a warrior’s weighing of herself and her honour, and in all of these she was confounded. She had offered her blade as a gift and she could as well have plunged the length of it into his chest. Caradoc turned perfectly white. To the merchant who must now, at the very least, be a singer, he said, ‘You told her.’

Luain said mildly, ‘I didn’t. There has not been time.’

‘But you knew.’

‘Of course.’

‘When?’

‘A long time ago.’ The singer smiled, crookedly. ‘I was present at your birth.’

‘So Cunobelin set you on to me.’ Loathing scalded them all. ‘Nursemaid and spy rolled into one.’

The singer’s smile remained unchanged. ‘Hardly. Your father and I have a degree of respect for each other but not so much trust that we would enter into something like this. To the best of my knowledge, Cunobelin still believes you to be in the far west with your mother’s people. If he hears otherwise, it will not come from me.’

‘Mother then?’ That was less acid; more surprise tinged with unwilling hurt. ‘How did she know of it? Conn swore to me he would say nothing.’

‘Conn has said nothing.’

Relief swept the angry, fair-skinned face. Whoever Conn was, his betrayal would have hurt. ‘Maroc, then? The dreamer who is also a singer. Of course. I should have known when I heard you sing the song of soul-parting on the boat.’ He smiled tightly, mocking himself.

‘You hid that well these past few months.’

‘Only from those who choose not to see what is before them.’ Mac Calma began to twist the sea from his tunic. The wool was wrecked; pulled out of all shape by the sea. Nothing he could do would repair it. ‘Segoventos knows who I am,’ he said. ‘And Brennos, the mate.’

‘Do they?’ Caradoc was scathing. ‘That was brave. With all of Gaul under the heel of an emperor who has outlawed “barbarian soothsayers, seers and bards” and the ports full of men desperate to prove their patriotic ardour? Or perhaps you haven’t seen a man crucified yet and think it no risk?’

He was pushing deliberately beyond the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. Three Gaulish dreamers had been crucified at the behest of Rome in the past year. All three had trained on Mona and, given his age, it was likely that Luain would have known them. Even had he not, the shadow of their dying still hung over the land. As a sacrilege, it defied description, but more than that, it confirmed the uncomprehending brutality of the enemy.

Luain mac Calma abandoned his tunic and stared out to sea. ‘I have seen it,’ he said. ‘It is not something I would court unnecessarily. In this, I believed I was taking no more risk than was wise. Some men I would trust with my life. Segoventos is one of them.’ He looked up. ‘I had considered that you might be another.’

Caradoc of the Ordovices, acknowledged warrior of three tribes, tilted his head, as if testing the thought. He was calmer than he had been, enough to smile with due irony as he said, ‘That would presuppose that I knew who you were.’

It was not the proper way to ask for an introduction but nor was it overly rude. The singer looked across at Macha, who nodded; a man should not have to make his own introductions in the presence of another who can make them. She, too, could raise the singer’s lilt when she chose.

‘Caradoc of the Three Tribes, warriors and dreamers of the Eceni, let me introduce to you Luain mac Calma, once of Hibernia, now merchant, singer, healer and dreamer of the elder council on Mona.’

So they shared them both, Mona and Hibernia, the two islands blessed by the gods. You could hear it in their voices, a blending of lilt and intonation, as if they had learned at the same knee - or over many years sharing the same bed. It should not have been surprising. The training of Mona was twelve years from beginning to end, and there was no reason to suppose that Macha had spent all of it chaste, any more than one could suppose that Airmid would do so. All summer, Breca had feared the arrival of a dreamer from Mona and the summons he must bring. Now, with Luain mac Calma standing on the shingle an arm’s length from Macha, Breaca looked, not to Airmid, but to her father. He felt her eyes on him and smiled his brief, flashing smile. It warmed her, as it had always done.

Caradoc was watching her. The anger had drained from him, leaving him thoughtful. She felt him weigh the fact of what he saw against the fictions he must have heard of the child-warrior of the Eceni. He, of all people, should know the difference between the truth and the myth that grew around a single act. Her blade still lay across her hands, an offered pledge, untaken. The laws of the warrior’s oath were clear; in accepting, he would bind them both to mutual protection on the field of battle and off it, to be broken only in case of death, dishonour or blood-debt. It was neither offered, nor taken, lightly. Caradoc stepped forward and laid his right hand on the hilt. With no formality at all, he said, ‘Thank you. I accept the oath.’ His smile leaped between them, privately.

The night was ending. On the far horizon, dawn slipped like a silvered knife between the storm and the sea and the textures of the light began to change. Things the night had hidden came shadily into view: the rope burns and bruises of the shipwreck and the white scar of an old burn on Luain mac Calma’s forearm. Further back on the headland, the fire had grown and the snap of burning driftwood brought sparks and drifting smoke. The men of the Greylag had stopped work on it and were sitting in a circle, putting effort into drying their clothes and their hair and making it clear they had no interest in the small group gathered closer to the shore. Eburovic said, ‘We should join your shipmates at the fire before the idiots kill the flame with wet driftwood and we find ourselves sitting out the rest of the night by a heap of cold-‘

‘No. Wait.’ Breaca stood very still, so that her eyes did not lose the thing they had just found. ‘There is another ship, a bigger one.’ The light changed, making the shape more solid. Her eyes widened. She pointed out to sea. ‘A much bigger one.’

They gathered round her, following the line of her sight to where, far out on the horizon, the ghostly outline of a ship big enough to hold ten herds of horses sat low in the waves. Luain mac Calma was first to see it with her. ‘It seems we are to be honoured with more company.’ His voice was run through with other tones than a singer’s. He turned to her father. ‘May I take it you are not trading directly with Rome?’

There was a moment’s silence. Eburovic did not move his gaze from the ship. ‘We are the Eceni,’ he said shortly. ‘We do not trade with Rome.’

‘Of course not. I apologize. And in any case, that’s not a merchant vessel. It’s a legionary troop ship and the last time one of those came on our shores it was an accident - one of Germanicus’ ships blown off course and foundering. Caradoc’s father rescued the survivors and returned them to the grateful arms of their emperor.’

‘And the time before that?’ asked Caradoc, softly. He must have known the answer.

Mac Calma turned and spat against the wind. ‘The time before that it was Caesar and the first wave of a Roman invasion. Let us pray to all the gods that it is not so again.’

If it was an invasion, it was destined for early failure. The ship wallowing off shore was three times the size of the Greylag and her crew five times as numerous. In familiar water and with a favourable wind she was one of the fastest ships in the known world. In foreign water, in catastrophic weather and with a master who knew nothing of the coastline, she was doomed. With the growing light of the dawn making the unfolding disaster plainer, Breaca joined the others by the fire and listened as a frantic, grieving Segoventos bellowed orders in the teeth of the wind to a man who was never going to hear them, about the sand bar and the tidal race and the need to steer between these two to bring the ship aground within reach of the land. The moment of impact was inevitable and painful and many of those who had lived through something like it turned away. Those who did not saw the ship foundering far out beyond the Greylag, and knew the distance to shore was too great for any to survive. By common consent, they waited, to see what could be done for the dead.

The first bodies washed up with the turning tide. There were not many; the ocean, having lost one crop, was not ready to give up the fresh one. A woman and a child came in together, clad only in underclothes as if woken in haste. Macha reached them first. She carried the child as she might a newborn infant, laying him at a safe place above the tide line. Breaca and Airmid together carried the mother. Luain and Eburovic made a stretcher of paired beams and laid planks across it and waited down at the shore line for the rest. A mariner came presently, lashed by a single turn of rope to a fractured beam. It, or one like it, had crushed his skull before he was washed ashore. Others followed: a handful of Roman legionaries who, extraordinarily, had thought to keep their weapons with them as they swam and, more extraordinary still, had not simply sunk to the bottom but had fought clear of the ship and kept themselves afloat long enough to be caught and carried by the tide. The swords had slipped from their sheaths and gone to feed the ocean but the rest of their armour was sound. Breaca, ‘Tagos and Caradoc stripped them in silence, working their knives into water-swollen buckles and knots, freeing them up slowly so that none had to be cut. Four scale-on-hide jerkins and as many good leather belts were removed whole and set to dry by the fire with Hail guarding them, while the bodies were freed of seaweed and laid out with the rest.

A long time after that, two boys came in, no more than Ban’s age. Each was naked and bore on his shoulders and back the scars of slaves. The men of the Greylag gathered them up and carried them to join the others; all were accorded the same respect regardless of rank, as strangers would be who were not enemies in battle.

Breaca was by the fire turning the rescued armour when Curaunios, the Greylag’s second mate, called out from the shore. ‘Here! Help me here. There’s one alive. Where’s the healer?’

It was an odd thing to call, but she learned later that Curaunios was from Gaul, of those families amongst the Aedui for whom Rome was not always the enemy. Breaca ran with Macha and found the two men kneeling in the sand, the one spewing water as Caradoc had done, the other supporting him gently. It was the first time she had seen either a living Roman or one of the warriors of southern Gaul. The Gaul was vast, a great blond bear of a man, with skin that had reddened under the lash of the sea and hair that was already streaked with grey.

The Roman was younger, not much older than Caradoc. He was naked, his skin summer dark to match the oak brown of his hair. Even from a distance, Breaca could see the marks of rope burns on his palms and strips of waterlogged skin that hung free from his shoulders. More spectacularly, a network of battle scars laced back and forth across his upper body. Unlike the slaves and more like the legionaries, he carried the bulk of these not on his back but on his chest and right forearm where enemy blades had passed his guard, and all of them were old. On his left side, below the ribs, a puckered cavity big enough to take a balled fist showed angry purple lines around the edges. Better than words, it said that he had spent his summer fighting and may have learned how to block the sword cuts coming for his throat but was less adept at avoiding the spear aimed through his ribs for his heart.

Caradoc, who had direct experience of Rome, said, ‘Equestrian,’ as if that explained it, and spat. The others gathered with him, watching with curiosity, uncertain of what to do. Segoventos pushed past them to stand before the man, explaining in heart-rent detail all the ways the ship could have been steered to safety. More than any of the others, he carried the guilt of watching a ship die and not having died himself to save it. He spoke to the Roman as a way to cleanse his soul, not because he expected to be heard.