The Boar Stone: Book Three of the Dalriada Trilogy (12 page)

Instinct said she must show courage in this place, whatever it cost. If she displayed weakness she felt she might be torn apart, like the bones Clíona had tossed to the floor, which were ripped into pieces by the snarling hounds.

The murmuring voices downstairs had long fallen silent when exhaustion at last overruled fear, and Minna tumbled into a dark sleep. Her weary soul wandered in blackness … blankness … nothingness. She sighed and surrendered the knots in her body …

… but suddenly men are struggling all around her in battle. The air is rancid, the sun glowing red through a haze.

Minna-in-the-dream gulps for breath, as a horse shifts beneath her. Her thighs grip its flanks, and sweat runs along bare, muscled arms on the reins and down her face from her brows, flooding her mouth, washing away blood. She is lost in a sea of screaming men jostling and falling, leaping in, staggering back. Swords twist in bellies. Spears run slippery with blood, staking throats to the ground. Arms are hacked off, the sinews split.

‘Lord!’ someone cries. ‘My prince, look to the east. More Romans have come
!’

Minna-in-the-dream doesn’t know the words … she can’t know… but she understands. And as she starts to turn in her saddle, shock crushes her chest, extinguishing the blood and stink and screams in one cry of despair …

Orla was tugging on her shoulders. Minna swallowed the cry, scrabbling at the mattress. Everything smelled unfamiliar, and a roof was pressing down on her head …
No. No.
In the way she had learned, her consciousness fought free of the vision, instantly flinging itself up and out into awareness. The images were cut off, and she grabbed the panic and shoved it down, stilling her flailing legs.

Only when she was rigid did she breathe out, unclenching her fists from the sheets. She turned to see Finola staring at her with enormous eyes, the puppy clutched to her chest. Orla sat back, her head nearly touching the sloping roof. ‘You were thrashing and moaning,’ she announced matter-of-factly. ‘It woke us up.’

Minna pulled herself up, dragging fingers through her unbound hair. The sheets were damp with sweat. ‘When you sleep somewhere new,’ she stammered, ‘sometimes it makes you restless.’

Orla shrugged and pointed at her sister. ‘
She
gets those dreams, too, and she cries really
stupid
things I don’t understand.’ Her teeth shone in the dim firelight from below. ‘I see things when I’m awake, which is much cleverer.’

‘I do, too!’ Finola whispered, outraged.

Minna stiffened with astonishment. ‘Awake?’

Orla plucked at the wool blanket. ‘Mama says the dreams are the work of devils because that’s what the Christian priests say. She wants a priest here, but Fa said the minute a priest came he would slit his throat.’

Finola pushed the puppy down as it tried to lick her. ‘The Lady Brónach says it is a gift and not the work of devils, and Fa says listen to her this one time but don’t tell Mama.’ She raised her chin, lip trembling. ‘But we don’t talk about it, so none of them can get angry at us.’ She glanced at Orla. ‘We don’t talk about it.’

Minna rested her chin on her knees. ‘Your mother is Christian?’ she ventured.

Orla nodded. ‘Of course. The Emperor is Christian, and she says,’ her voice slipped eerily into the shrill tones of the queen, ‘by the tearing of her womb to give Fa his mewling children, she will have this family Christian one day, too.’

Minna swayed, light-headed. She still tasted blood. ‘Do you want a priest?’

‘
No
!’ Orla hissed with childish passion. ‘Last year our brother Garvan went with Fa to a council on the Wall and a boy there had a priest tutor and he had to study all sorts of nasty things.’ She paused, breathing hard. ‘I was
glad
when Fa said we could have no priest. He said to Mama if one comes here then …’ She made a cutting motion across her neck and now imitated a gruff man’s voice. ‘No head, no priest.’

When Minna stifled an exclamation, Orla hastily clarified, ‘But Fa doesn’t shout at us.’

‘No?’

‘We only make him smile, don’t we, Finola, because when we grow up we’re going to fight by his side with swords – he would love us for ever then. And
that’s
why,’ she finished, returning to her theme, ‘we don’t want any old priest, because Fa hates them.’ She folded her arms. ‘And we don’t want to learn any nasty priest things from
you
.’

‘Orla!’ Finola squeaked, kicking her sister beneath the covers.

With a cry, Orla flung them back and delivered a pinch to her sister’s arm. The younger girl burst into sobs; the puppy ran around the bed madly.

At long last Minna calmed the girls and got them to sleep. But she could not easily join them, for the tremors running through her.

She could still feel the dread that slammed into her belly in the vision, like a fist doubling her over. But she had never seen so much; never remembered it so vividly, felt it, tasted it, smelled it. What could it mean? That something had cracked open in her – perhaps she was going mad.

Minna lay down and cradled her cheek, eyes wide to the darkness.

Chapter 11

T
he next morning Minna ate a bread roll with gritty eyes, the hard dough forming a knot in her belly. ‘Bannock,’ Orla instructed through the crumbs. ‘That’s what we call them.’

She turned to run off with Finola, but Clíona’s hands held both girls there as she turned to inspect Minna. Clíona was deceiving, that plump body, gold hair and milky skin suggesting softness. But there was nothing soft about this woman: her square hands were reddened, her brows lowered.

Through Orla, Clíona told her she must care for the girls’ clothes and baths once a week, learn to cook bannocks on the hearth-stone and porridge in the pot, and when she wasn’t busy with them, bring firewood and grind grain and any other things she saw fit.

Minna had never been ordered this way. Ashamed, her fingers brushed the welt on her neck, stinging after her restless night. Clíona saw and pointed at a small clay pot. This time Minna caught one in five of her words. The woman mimed rubbing something between her hands. ‘Sheep fat. Skin.’ She pointed at the slave-ring. ‘Help skin.’

‘She said—’ Orla began, but Minna cut her off.

‘I heard what she said.’ She didn’t know what to make of this unexpected kindness, until Clíona shrugged and said something else before turning away.

‘She says if that chafing turns into a wound you’ll be no use to anyone.’

Minna halted the sinking of her belly. She was just the same now as the pigs that gave meat, the cows that gave milk and the geese that gave feathers. Just the same, and no more.

Two weeks slid by with Minna confined to the king’s hall, the tiny shed she had taken over for the lessons, and the waste-pit on the cliff edge. At first she only spoke to the girls. The queen was still asleep when they all crept down in the morning, and they were abed when she came into the king’s hall at night.

Clíona barked only brief orders at her, but now and again she caught the maid watching her, as did all the servants. Wondering, Minna supposed, whether she would sink or swim. She thought of Cian’s last words to her:
Swim as hard as you can, until I can get us out of here
. He was her only – albeit tenuous – link to home. And he had risked himself to save her, despite his brittle sarcasm and scorn of loyalty. She clung to those words and the last sight of his pale face.

After a few days, Clíona sent one of the servants to teach Minna her tasks. Keeva was around her age, but small, with a wiry build, black hair and dark eyes. She wore her hair in a side-braid threaded with gull feathers, which, according to Orla, denoted her as Attacotti, a tribe allied to the Dalriadans who lived on islands in the western sea. She was quick-witted and sharp-tongued, and studied Minna with great suspicion.

Beneath those beady eyes, Minna threw herself into working hard, pride prodding her to prove all the servants wrong. After a week, her dress was stained with a mix of salt, meat blood, flour and mud, the old wool already wearing through into holes.

Sniffing disdainfully, Clíona dug out a pile of old clothes from the storage baskets, indicating that Minna should pick what she wanted. After a wary moment she pounced on two pairs of worn deer-hide trousers – for to her surprise women wore them here – tunics in a dull brown check, a flax belt and a hooded cloak of rough, undyed wool. Avoiding her eyes, Clíona also threw in some sheepskin boots. Minna gratefully peeled off her muddy sandals and dug her toes into the warm wool. The wind was growing more bitter up on the crag, blowing in blustery sheets of rain.

Minna’s attempts to speak Dalriadan were clearly frustrating Keeva and she seemed to assign herself to setting that right first, instructing her as they worked side by side. Between Keeva, Finola and Orla it wasn’t long therefore before she was swiftly picking up the barbarian speech. Uncannily swiftly.

Minna told herself it must be because of Mamo, shrugging away the unease at how familiar it felt. Mamo’s tales had many words from Erin, and Erin is where the Dalriadans came from, Orla said.

As the days passed, she gradually sank into the sea of language around her, snatching at meanings until words resolved into sentences and then sense. Fluency came easily, as if floating up from inside her. She spent her days asking and listening, leaving no time for anything else to make its way in.

She did it to exhaust her mind, so the only time she was alone, in bed, she prayed to the Mother Goddess for Cian and then curled into a ball, fleeing grief. Hiding in sleep.

The sky clouded over from the sea, and when storm rain began to pour down one day Minna thought she might at last be able to slip unnoticed to the village to seek out Cian. After all, she wasn’t leaving the dun, as Brónach had expressly forbidden, just the crag, and since everyone was inside for once there was no one to see her go. The drops pounded the earth so hard the air was a curtain of needles, echoing her frightened, thudding heart. The few who braved the sodden paths were buried in cloaks, heads down. The guards at the rock arch were huddled in their tower, no longer pacing the walls.

The land all around the crag was obscured by rain, the thatched roofs streaming. Minna leaped over muddy rivulets and edged under dripping eaves. She kept pausing to listen and found the stables by the whinnies of the horses – and the smell.

The doors at each end of the long building were propped open for air. Avoiding the end where the horse-boys diced and cleaned tack, Minna went to the other side of the stables and discovered Cian in an empty stall on his own.

He was sitting in the straw against the wall, eyes closed, head back. The first thing she saw was the vivid purple bruise along one cheek and other, fading marks over his neck and jaw. She sank on her knees beside him. His eyes opened quickly, flashing with an instinctive, wild defiance. ‘Oh …’ she breathed, and went to touch the bruise, as if she might soothe it.

He jerked his head away, avoiding her eyes. ‘Don’t.’

She sat back, crooking her arms about her knees. His tunic was smeared with blood and manure, and he had no knife or shears so his jaw was shadowed with stubble, his black hair longer and matted with straw. ‘How did this happen? This wasn’t … your master?’

‘Not yet.’ His smile was bitter as he tilted his head towards the horse-boys. ‘Little bastards down the other end don’t take kindly to being bettered by a Roman, that’s all.’

‘Bettered?’

‘I’m the best rider by far. And I curse them in words they can’t understand.’ He shrugged. ‘I can hold my own against two or three, but ten …’ The others were boys of thirteen and fourteen, scrappy and bold.

Her eyes fell to the scabs across his knuckles, and a pang of fear for him loosened her tongue. ‘You told me we had to swim.’ His head came around, his eyes sparking dangerously, but she ploughed on. ‘I thought you meant … well … keeping our eyes down and our mouths shut, biding our time.’

A desperate anger flared in his face. ‘Don’t tell me what to do, Tiger. You don’t know … anything.’ He bit off his words.

‘Then tell me what I don’t know,’ she whispered. All this time she had been struggling to make her way here, trying to keep her mind blank, and he had been suffering like this.

He merely turned away, his chin jutting out. ‘Surely it’s better not to provoke them,’ she said softly. ‘Or they might hurt you worse.’

He stared out of the open door. ‘You have to show these people that you have no fear, or they will be on you like a pack of wild dogs. You don’t know what they can do: they’re animals.’ The loathing in his voice turned her stomach, and she searched what she could see of his face, confused by this change in him.

His humour had often been self-deprecating, his smiles sardonic. But now a mask had been torn away and it was raw anger that beat upon her senses. Her belly twisted with a frightening, instinctive revulsion. How could she feel that for Cian, who had saved her, who had teased her? Only now he wasn’t teasing, and there was darkness in his face beyond the bruises, a pressure in the air about him that thrust her back.