Dreaming the Hound (6 page)

The truth broke through the worlds so that she saw her son whether she wanted to or not. In another place and another time, Cunomar turned his head and stared at his mother with a stranger’s eyes. She met his gaze and tried to imagine him weeping tears of gold, and could not.

Because she had heard Graine, and seen Cunomar, so then also she saw Cygfa, Caradoc’s daughter, who was not the child of Breaca’s flesh but had become the child of her soul.

As Cunomar had been, so Cygfa, too, had been captured and taken prisoner to Rome with Caradoc, their father. Exactly as Cunomar had, she had stood in the shadow of the cross and thought herself about to be hanged on it. Exactly unlike Cunomar, she had drawn in strength from the core of herself and had not succumbed to bitterness afterwards.

When Cygfa had gone out to sit her long-nights and came back a woman, ablaze with her dreaming, Breaca had been the one who spoke for her before the elders and hailed her as daughter in all ways but those of flesh, which were ever the least.

Tall as her father and as beautiful, she braided kill-feathers by the handful into her hair before battle and mounted a horse of her own breeding. Warriors crowded close to touch her blade for the luck it would give and there was no doubt that she would fight well and kill cleanly, and that if she died in conflict it would be only because Briga had need of her in the other worlds. In all the battles since her return from Rome, she had fought at the side of the Boudica, brilliantly.

From somewhere distant, the ancestor said, You love her as a daughter. The children of your blood see it daily and mourn. Do you wonder that they cleave closer to others than to you?

Breaca lay on cold stone at the river’s edge, her mouth a desert for lack of water. She was too hot, and too cold, shuddering. Her breath was not enough to give true voice to her words. She answered, whispering, ‘You twist the truth. My children know themselves equal in my eyes.’

Are you sure?

‘Yes.’

She was not sure. Her whispered voice said so, and the rush of the water, and the ancestor’s words, growing ever more faint.

You are Eceni. It is your blood and your right and your duty. It is not too late to keep the children from weeping. Only find a way to give back to the people the heart and courage they have lost. Find a way to call forth the warriors and to arm them, find at least one with courage to match yours and you may prevail. At the last, find the mark that is ours and seek its place in your soul. Come to know it, and you will prevail.

The ancestor’s words etched a serpent-spear in the darkness, cast in fire, hung against a summer sky.

The snake, having two heads, watched past and future, writhing. The spear was crooked, as if broken. Its two blades pointed down and up, to earth and sky, joining the realm of the people to the realm of the gods.

Others joined it, chiselled into the living rock over and again on the walls of the cave from floor to unreachable roof. Anywhere and everywhere, the twin-headed serpent gazed equally to past and future and the crooked spear lay across, joining the gods to their people. The fire guttered and gave more light, filling the chiselled marks with molten metal so that they came alive and stood shimmering from the walls.

The light was too bright. It hurt to look at it. Believing herself dying, Breaca turned her head away. ‘What of my children?’

Would you have them in the slave pens? If you would have your victory, you must lose them. Better lost now to Mona, where they are loved, than later to Rome.

The serpent-spears on the walls faded to dark. Only the single fire-cast mark hung against the sky-blue roof of the cave.

With disturbing solicitude, the ancestor said, There is none other who can do it, else you would not be asked. If you go with all speed, then the tide of Rome may yet be turned.

‘Do you promise me that?’

I promise you nothing. Only that I will be with you, and that if you ask it, I can give you death, which you may crave, or my aid to live, which you may not.

She woke to the smell of burning.

Her cloak lay smouldering on the edge of the fire and the wound in her arm had burst open, leaking an evil-smelling pus. The pain that racked her was more than she had ever known, even at childbirth. She stared up into blackness and saw nothing and heard nothing, only the ever-running river and its echoes into silence.

After a while, she rolled onto her side and then onto her front and doused the edge of her cloak to stop the burning and then drank a little and then, gritting her teeth, pushed her bad arm into the water and let the current strip it clean.

Later, still crawling, she found the messenger’s saddlebags and the wormwood and vervain and plantain and other things she could not name that Efnis had sent, in case the bearer were injured on his journey.

Airmid would have known how best to use them. Breaca did as much as she could remember, and prayed to the gods, not the ancestor-dreamer, for help in her healing.

She slept again, for a long time, and woke cooler and shaking with hunger not fever and so knew the worst of it was over. She ate from the messenger’s saddlebags, thanking his shade for his foresight and the gift of food, and went slowly to tend the horses. The roan mare knew her and whickered, nuzzling her hair. She stood scratching its withers and teasing out tangles from its mane.

In a while, because she had been thinking of it and had reached a decision and needed to speak it aloud, she said, ‘We will stay here in safety until I am well enough to ride and then we will go east. Alone. We may find warriors and rouse them to battle, we may find the iron to arm them, and one to lead them. If we do not turn the tide of Rome, it will not be for want of trying. But I pledge to you now, that if the legions come to take you or your young into slavery, I will kill you, or them, rather than let it happen.’

The mare knew nothing of slavery, only heard the undercurrents of passion. She turned her head and rested her chin on Breaca’s shoulder and lipped at her sweat-soaked hair and for a while, in the darkness, they were company, one for the other, before the journey east began.

IV.

A THREE-QUARTER MOON TIPPED THE EDGE OF THE HILL. A WREN sang for the dawn. The child Graine lay behind a square edged boulder with her hand on the neck of a slate-blue hound called Stone. Untrue to his name, the hound did not lie still, but quivered under her touch, his gaze fixed on the steep slope of the hill at the place where the heather of the high land gave way to grass and long stretches of bracken. Hay had been cut there in summer and the grass had regrown to a finger’s height, making good grazing. Graine watched where the hound watched and, as her eyes became his eyes, a triangle of smudged outlines became the shapes of three yearling hares, feeding.

The hares were young and unwary. Graine, who was also young, had listened to others’ tales of hunting: ‘Watch them from a distance. When you get one alone, that’s the time to strike.’

Dubornos had told her that, the gaunt and watchful singer whom the gods had returned alive from Rome when her father had been left behind. Dubornos had been talking of hunting Romans but hares were not so different.

Graine lay on the damp turf, waiting. Nemain, the moon, sank lower until the hare that lived on her surface could no longer clearly be seen. The whispers of the half-light changed and became those of day. Graine would have preferred an endless night; in the darkness the grandmothers spoke to her from the lands beyond life and she felt she understood the world. In daylight, she had to rely on the unreliable words of the adults around her and they were too confusing.

It was not that they lied, simply that they did not have the same view of the world as the grandmothers did, so that it was hard to know what would please them. Her mother, Breaca, was especially difficult to read and it was her mother whom Graine most wanted to please - if she were alive. That question had ruled the morning and all the time before it since the dark evening with Airmid when both of them had seen things in the river that they did not wish to see.

The grandmothers had not helped with that vision, nor explained it since. With nothing more solid than pain seen and felt, Graine had decided to behave as if her mother still lived and would return soon, counting the Roman dead and, perhaps, quietly impressed by the actions of the daughter she had left behind.

On the mountainside, watched by the hound called Stone, one of the bucks, bolder than its siblings, moved away seeking greener grass. When you get one alone … At a certain moment, when the sun showed her the shine of the hare’s eye and the blue hound ceased to quiver against her side and became instead entirely still, Graine lifted her hand.

The first few strides of the chase froze the child’s breath in her throat. She had seen hounds course a hare often enough but never before had her hound hunted down her chosen hare, her twisting, turning tawny pelt and flash of cream underbelly with its pulsing life and floating run and round black eyes, perfect as polished jet. For a dozen heartbeats, Graine lay still feeling herself a true hunter at last, already illuminated in the glow of her mother’s pride.

This was the heart of her plan: her uncle Ban, the traitor, had been named Harehunter when he was still a boy and a friend to the tribes. It seemed to Graine that her mother grieved for her lost brother as much as she did for Caradoc who had been the fountain of her soul. If Graine could not replace her father - and the years of his absence had shown quite clearly that she could not then she could perhaps become another hare-hunter, fit to assuage the grief of Ban’s loss.

It would not change the reality of Breaca’s wounding, or the confrontation with the serpent-dreamer, but it might at the very

least make her smile. Graine Harehunter. It had a good ring to it. She could hear it spoken by Airmid and see how the Boudica, surrounded by the elders, would accept it and be happy.

So close. Hunter to hunted, hunted from hunter. So close.

Stone was past his prime but fit after a long summer at war. As he ran, he stretched long and flat like a hawk and the distance from hunter to hunted closed until he could strike and almost kill - but not quite.

The hare was well grown and had lived through its own summer of danger. It knew enough of the hunt to save itself from the first strike. White teeth cracked shut in the air where its chest had been but the beast was already gone. Desperate for respite, it jinked and turned on its axis so that, for the first time, it faced Graine who had risen to her feet and stood knee deep in heather. Far away as it was, the hare raised its head and looked her full in the eyes, pleading. Her hare, seeking her help, pleading for the freedom simply to live.

It was not at all what she had planned. Fear cracked over Graine, drowningly. Not her own fear, but the hare’s, the hammering, heart-stopping terror of the hunted beast. Before she could take a breath to shout, it spun once more on its own length, ducked under the hound’s neck and fled back towards her, straight as a spear, diving between her legs for sanctuary.

She would have called Stone off if she could. She did her best, screaming at him until her throat was raw, but everyone knew that when any hound of Hail’s line was hunting, or at war, the only thing that would stop it was a thrown spear. Graine was only six and she had no spear to throw, and even if she had she would never have dared to harm the hound who carried the heart and soul of the legendary Hail and was all her mother had left of her life before Rome’s invasion. She stood stone still in the heather and the hound coursed past her, impersonal as lightning, as deaf, and as lethal.

The hare was an arm’s reach away. Time stretched as it turned and turned again, a third time and a fourth, harepin on harepin, dodging the crunching jaws for a few breaths more of a life so precious that Graine could taste its need to survive as an iron wetness on her tongue. She reached for the beast, desperate to help, and her movement was its undoing. Faltering, it missed the last turn and Stone, excelling himself, stretched that hand’s length longer to reach it. The hare died, squealing, with its chest cracked shut on its heart. To the last, the shining black eyes remained locked with Graine’s, pleading silently for sanctuary and release.

In that moment, at six years old, standing knee deep in wet grass

with the half-ghost of Nemain’s moon hazy in the western sky, Graine nic Breaca mac Caradoc, heir to the royal line of the Eceni, understood with crushing certainty the true helplessness of the gods when the forces they unleash with good intent destroy those who have called on them for help. The enormity of it, the illusion of hope when there was only certain death, overwhelmed her. She sat in the grass and cried as only a child can cry, for the hare, who was Nemain’s beast above all others; for her mother and father who would for ever live apart; for herself who was lost in a world of uncertain forces where Cygfa and Cunomar had returned from the dead to lay claim to parts of her mother’s heart that were already too much divided, and last for the brave, big-hearted war hound who had given his all in the hunt and came to her for praise and did not understand why she did not give it but instead clung to his neck and wept.

Airmid, dreamer of Nemain, found her shortly after noon, by the stream in that part of the wood where the sun was least. Graine sat on a fallen birch log with the hound, Stone, lying to one side and the skinned body of a hare on the turf beside her. The skin was stretched out between rocks and had been partly cleaned. The head, messily severed, sat on a rock in midstream, facing west, to the ancestors. A lock of long, oxblood hair streamed in the water around it, pegged down by other stones. A bald patch showed on the side of Graine’s head as she sat hunched and weeping at the stream’s edge.

The dreamer had searched since dawn for the child who was not her daughter, but had come to hold that place in her heart. Seeing her, a morning’s anxiety flared nearly to anger and fell away to a deeper fear. She stood still, believing herself unseen and unheard. The hound showed no sign of having noticed, but still, without looking up, Graine leaned forward and turned the hare to face across the water towards her. ‘I wanted to honour it,’ she said. ‘It showed me what became of mother in the cave of the ancestors.’