Dreaming the Eagle (23 page)

The Roman had not been the ship’s master and he had no feel for the sea. He knew only that he was alone and surrounded by strangers in a land he had never intended to visit. When he could take a full breath without choking, he shook off the helping hands, bunched his fists on the shingle and pushed himself to his feet.

And stopped. The tip of Breaca’s blade drew blood from the water-softened skin at the tuck of his chin. Caradoc, warrior of three tribes, who had killed at least once in battle, held the hilt and kept the blade level. Breaca stood ten paces away with the empty sheath strapped to her back and her hands by her sides; she had pledged him the blade, and she would not stop him taking it unless his enemy was of the Eceni. Her scarred hand throbbed.

‘You are Roman?’ Caradoc spoke in Latin, levelly and without emotion. Even for Breaca, with no knowledge of the tongue, the meaning was clear.

The foreigner stared at him and said nothing. Caradoc nodded. The lethargy of the sea was completely gone, replaced by a balanced keenness. His gaze floated easily round the gathered group. His eyes, seen in the odd, snow-dense light, were of the same metallic grey as the blade beneath them. His hair was drier than it had been, and paler. ‘This man is the enemy of our people,’ he said. ‘Does anyone wish to dispute that?’

No-one did. Seamen and Eceni alike shook their heads. Without thinking, Breaca reached for her belt knife and drew it clear. Caradoc saw it and nodded his thanks, lightly, to her and then to the group.

‘In that case, I claim blood-right; for the death of my mother’s grandfather, for the men who fought beside him against Caesar, for the dreamers of Mona who died last year in Lugdunum, capital of the three Gauls, for all those unnamed of our people who have died in slavery under the yoke of Rome since they first brought their warships to this land, for all these and more, his life is mine.’

He raised the blade with both hands. The man on his knees before him, who was both Roman and a soldier and had just survived certain death in the sea, thrust himself to his feet in the space before the killing stroke and made a grab for the hilt.

Caradoc smiled and stepped wide and took his left hand from the sword, changing grip from that of an executioner to that of a man entering battle. He nodded with a detached respect. ‘Good. Thank you. I would not have liked it like that.’

The blade swung in a long, singing arc with a man’s neck at the apex - and passed on and through without drawing blood. The Roman lay on the shore, spitting sand from bloodied teeth. A red mark showed on his shoulder where he had been thrust to the ground. Caradoc frowned and changed his grip for the back swing. Segoventos, ship’s master, who was bigger than both of them put together, reached a hand to the younger man’s arm so that the blade stopped still as if grounded in oak. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He is not yours. You have not the right.’

Caradoc freed his hand. He took a step back and kept the blade, but the tip was lower than the hilt and he was not within reach of his victim. He shook his head, like a dog out of water, gaping.

‘Segoventos? He’s a Roman. He needs to die.’

‘He is a shipwrecked man, as you are. If the gods wanted him dead, they would have taken him. You have not the right to say otherwise.’

‘I have more right than you. This is not your land, Gaul.’

‘Nor yours - son of the Sun Hound.’ It was said quietly; Segoventos only bellowed for the important things, like the life of a ship. For the rest of the time, his size spoke for him.

Caradoc let his breath out in a rush. He spun to face the others. The men of the Greylag, who had known him for six months as Math, boy of the Ordovices, were eyeing him with undisguised curiosity, waiting for him to deny the parentage that had been named and then, when he did not, making all the assumptions that went with it. Caradoc looked past them to Eburovic and Luain mac Calma. His nostrils flared tightly. ‘This is your land. Will you do as my father did and let him go with guest-gifts and the promise of trade?’

‘No.’ Macha stepped forward to stand in front of the Roman. She did not point, or gesture or raise her voice, but Breaca had never seen so clearly the authority of the dreamer used at will. ‘You know that is not the way of the gods. Your father acted against the will of the elders in what he did and I have no doubt he will be called to account for it, in this world or the next. But what you are doing is no better. You are not facing this man in fair combat. He is not even armed. He is not responsible for the acts of his fathers, any more than you are for yours, and even less so for men whose blood he may not share at all. If he is an enemy, it is in his own right and it is not for us to say so here. We will not compound your father’s error. Instead, we will take this man back and call a meeting of the elder council and let the gods and the grandmothers decide his fate.’

‘You will call a council in this weather?’ Caradoc spread his arms wide, taking in the snow and the ice and the aftermath of the storm. ‘Can your dreamers fly through the air like the deer-men of the northlands and join their councils in the deepest drifts of snow?’

‘Hardly.’ Macha smiled, thinly, and he was reminded yet again that he faced a dreamer. His eyes dropped before hers did. ‘We can do nothing while the snow holds us bound. It was enough to come here and we are not yet back safely. If we return without loss, there will be eighteen new mouths to feed and sleeping places to find and that will keep us occupied until the snow lifts. When it does, the council will meet. In the meantime, the man is a guest, as you are. He will not leave us; he is a lone man in a strange land and if we can find little food in it, he will find none.’

‘You think so?’ Caradoc chewed on the flesh of his cheek. Slowly, he reversed the blade and returned it to Breaca. ‘And if he does not understand this and still tries to run?’ he asked quietly. ‘The Romans believe themselves masters of everything. Would you let him roam free in the Eceni heartlands?’

‘No.’ Macha paused and turned round. Luain mac Calma had moved down the shore to stand beside the Roman and was translating her words into Latin as they spoke. She spoke slowly, so her meaning was not lost.

‘I believe this man to be intelligent. On that basis, he will be allowed to live. If he is stupid and tries to run, then you may hunt him down as you would hunt a wolf who has broken into the foaling pens. The elders will not prevent you.’

The Roman stood upright on the shingle, ignoring the cold. He was a head shorter than Luain mac Calma and the contrast made him seem smaller still, but he stood like a warrior and did not show the anger Breaca might have expected. He thought for a moment after Macha finished, then answered briefly in Latin.

Unexpectedly, mac Calma grinned. Inclining his head with elaborate courtesy, he said, ‘Our new guest thanks you for your offer of hospitality and is honoured to accept. He assures you he will not break into the foaling pens.’

‘Good.’

Macha turned away from the sea. Those who had been watching turned with her and began the long walk back up the shore towards the horses. Ban and Hail went ahead, driving the new animals, keeping them well away from the home herd in case of fighting or disease. Eburovic brought up his spare riding horse and offered it to Segoventos, ship’s master, who accepted. Others were mounted, some two to a horse, until none was left walking. The foreigner rode double with Luain mac Calma, with ‘Tagos riding alongside.

Macha held back until Caradoc and Breaca, coming last, caught up with her. The warrior rode as if born on horseback, his hands guiding the beast along a path barely seen in the opening dawn, his mind clearly elsewhere. He made space for Macha beside him, granting the deference due to a dreamer. When there was no-one but Breaca to hear them, she said, ‘You will not fight the Roman, I will not permit it. But you may like to give thought, before we return to the roundhouse, as to how you will respond when our young bloods find it necessary to challenge you.’

‘You think they will do so?’

‘How could they not? It’s winter and the nights are long. If they were bored before, their condition will not be improved by the addition of eighteen men, one of them a warrior whose deeds have been sung in the roundhouse since they were children.’ Macha was not angry. If anything, she seemed mildly amused. ‘What do the Ordovices do when the tedium of winter becomes unsurpassable and someone throws a firebrand into the kindling?’

Caradoc took it in good humour. ‘We throw spears at the mark,’ he said. ‘If that fails, we run races and try not to kill anyone.’ He turned to Breaca, who rode on his other side. ‘Amongst my mother’s people, if a warrior’s pledge is made on a blade as we have made it, those between whom it is shared may not fight each other, even in play; they are bound as brother to sister, to defend and protect unless one acts in such a way that the other is bound to break the pledge.’

Breaca said, ‘It is the same among the Eceni. We can neither fight nor race unless one dishonours the life or family of the other.’ She had known it when she offered him the blade, and had seen before Macha had that it would be necessary and why. For the first time in her life, she had met someone with whom she was evenly matched; they could spend their lives splitting hairs over the results of each race or risking their lives in endless winter challenges - or they could avoid races and challenges from the start.

Caradoc nodded, thoughtfully. ‘We could still race on horseback,’ he offered. ‘That would not offend the gods.’ His glance held buried laughter and the certainty that she would lose, which was ridiculous.

‘We can’t race in winter,’ said Breaca, ‘the ground is too hard. And …’ She smoothed a hand down the grey mare’s neck. In three years, the beast had grown into all her hidden promise. Even thickcoated for winter, her breeding showed clearly in her lines and paces. ‘There would be no point until you have your own horses. There are no others amongst the Eceni that would match against this.’

Caradoc grinned back, pushing his borrowed horse to a trot. ‘Maybe not. In that case perhaps we should all pray to the gods for a quick and easy end to the winter and a peaceful start to the spring.’

X.

THE END TO WINTER THAT YEAR WAS NEITHER QUICK NOR EASY.

Too many bodies sleeping in too little space made the days long and the nights uncomfortable. As Macha had foreseen, the arrival of the Roman caused less of a stir than the firebrand son of the Sun Hound. The foreigner may have been a warrior and an enemy, but his lineage was unknown and his name had not been three years a watchword for skill and fighting ability as Caradoc’s had been. The young warrior was challenged within days of arrival, with the sea still in him and the skin still peeling in strips from his arms. Predictably, it was Dubornos who made the challenge and, predictably, he lost. ‘Tagos was next, because he had to be, and he lost too, if not so badly. The seamen began to take sides, swelling the factions that grew at the end of every winter as those newly made warriors sought to prove themselves against their peers. Fights broke out more often than was acceptable and the dreamers were called in more than once to break them up and heal the injured.

Caradoc, to his credit, did not take sides. Instead, he gathered the ringleaders and talked them into a series of crazy, impossible competitions, telling them that this was how his mother’s people, the Ordovices, spent the months between solstice and spring. In this, clearly, he was stretching the facts; if the warriors of the war hammer competed thus throughout the frozen winters of the west, there would not have been enough of them left alive and uninjured come the summer to make war in the way that legend had it. Still, the half-truth served well. On a freezing afternoon with the sun bright and the snow caked to ice, he showed them how to build sledges and had them race, six at a time, down the long, curving track between the paddock rails, throwing spears at straw targets as they went.

He won, but then he had raced a sledge before, on mountains far steeper than the paddock slope. Spirits ran high and ‘Tagos, who had come closest to him, gained in stature. When the charge of that wore off, those who had lost the snow race most dismally borrowed axes and cut down a pair of pine trees, cutting the side branches to make poles of them so that they could race in knockout heats across the river. There was less snow now; the wind had backed round to the south, warming the air. In places, the ice on the river was leaf-thin so that one could look through it and see the fast water beneath. For the final heats, the poles were greased with tallow, to make it more of a challenge. Two of the seamen fell in. One of them hit a boulder on landing and broke his shoulder. The result was a tie; ‘Tagos matched pace throughout with Caradoc. Dubornos came close behind them. No-one else cared enough to finish.

Spring came with a rush after that and suddenly they were too busy to race. The warm wind continued, soothing the last of the snow and ice into water. The river ran in spate, flooding the low ground on either side, carrying away the debris of the winter and leaving churned mud in its wake. Higher up, on the southern edge of the forest, the meltwater washed over the sandy loam, dragging long streaks of sand down through the pastures and into the settlement, where it found its way into the cooking pots and the sleeping hides and was, everyone agreed, worse than the mud.

The trade routes opened as soon as the snow allowed it. Runners were sent out to summon the council and Eburovic harnessed his cobs and forced his wagons through the mud to bring back grain from those who could spare it and ale and - joy - a deer’s bladder full of salt. In the paddocks surrounding the village, the home herd grazed on the green shoots that pushed up as soon as the pressure of snow lifted. At the top of the hill, separated by two clear fields in case they brought disease, the new horses were fed the last of the winter fodder to supplement the poor grass. Under the warming sun, they lost the hollows behind their ribs and above their eyes and began to shed the harsh coats of the sea crossing. Each day, as the moon grew smaller, they rubbed out more, itching it away in handfuls on the ageing thorns that bounded their paddock to reveal moth-eaten patches of rich, shining hide. Then one day the last of the old hair was gone and the last of winter with it so that the air lost the damp smell of rotting rushes and wet wood and was filled instead with the lift of new leaves and the sound of the cock redbreasts fighting.