The Boar Stone: Book Three of the Dalriada Trilogy (2 page)

Broc tried to argue again but Minna tore free and stalked away, shutting her ears. Her throat ached and she swallowed it down impatiently.

The boys were swinging on the gate to the fields. Seeing her stricken face, Lucius grinned a smile chopped in half by missing teeth. ‘Just think, Minna, a day away from
all
of them!’

‘All of them!’ chubby Marcus repeated.

Minna sighed, lifting her face to the sun. The trees, grass and birds didn’t judge her. ‘Then let us go,’ she said hoarsely. ‘Now.’

Up on the moors, her anger cooled and a sense of reality began to set in. Beneath a windswept expanse of heather lay the remains of an abandoned Roman fort, its ditches and banks mere humps in the turf. She sank into a ditch and left the boys to play, gazing blankly down at the patchwork of fields and pastures. A bumble bee blundered into her cheek. The shouts of the workers floated up from the orchards. Up here was peace, but down there the white Villa Aurelius stood out starkly in the green land. Severus belonged to that world. Minna’s heart plunged; her eyes closed.

As a woman she had no rights of her own. Her family was of mixed native and Roman blood, but Roman laws held sway in this land now. And the law said she had to be under the rule of a man: father, brother or husband. There was no middle way, no other choice.

Half the girls on the estate were after Severus; that much she knew. He was a widower with a secure job, and was trusted by Master Publius. He was weather-beaten, but not grossly ugly.
He was a catch
. That was the whisper from the spinsters and maidens. A catch, like a whiskery fish that gave good eating.

Her thoughts shifted to the mating part. She had been reviled by every man on this farm since she was a child so it was easy to bury the stirrings that came when her blood was first called by the moon. Now, the thought of a man grunting over her like a pig elicited no feeling at all – and that was the worse thing. Minna wanted to
feel
, to live.

The fear rose, choking her. She struggled with it until, all in a rush, dread turned to resolve and she opened her eyes.

No matter what she said to herself, or what Broc bellowed, something in Minna absolutely refused this path. She could not accept it and remain alive, she realized with a surge of passion, sitting bolt upright. She could not go back and say yes, for it would not be
her
blood in her veins, her heart beating.

‘Ho!’ Lucius screamed from the bank above. ‘I am a soldier and I come to kill you, barbarian!’ He hefted a bent hazel sapling as a spear, his face contorted.

She forced a smile. ‘Oh, don’t hurt me, brave soldier.’

‘Hurt you? You are a savage, my enemy, so here I come!’

‘Here I come, here I come!’ Marcus also screeched, and both boys crashed on top of Minna with shrieks and whoops. She wrestled and fought, until they were all lying in a breathless, tangled heap among the bracken.

She pushed her braids back, pulling down her dress. ‘Why do I always have to be the enemy?’ she wheezed, wincing.

‘Because you’re so pale and funny-looking,’ Lucius replied, with a quizzical frown.

‘Why, thank you, Lucius.’

Marcus collapsed over her legs, his plump tummy exposed under his tunic. ‘People say your eyes are odd but
I
think they look like water.’

Lucius rocked on all fours. ‘And they say your face is too bony and your eyes too large, and your skin too white with that black hair, and you look
unearthly
,’ he recited faithfully.

Minna’s smile faded. These were Broc’s thoughts, too. She could have her pick of men, he said, if she stopped scraping her hair back, making her features so stark, and began belting her tunics to give her body some curves. But she knew there was no solution for her reviled, mistrusted eyes, which were a pale, icy green surrounded by a dark ring that made them glow.

‘But …’ Lucius ran on desperately, his grin faltering, ‘
we
think you are pretty, just like the painting of Minerva on Mama’s wall!
And
the statue by Papa’s study of that lady in Rome.’

Marcus linked hands around her neck. ‘Don’t be sad,’ he lisped. ‘We’ll let you play battles with us.’

She cleared her throat, heaving Marcus off her lap. ‘But I can’t be a soldier, because I’m a girl.’

‘No, you can’t be a soldier because you’ve got
barbarian
blood,’ Lucius teased, relieved.

‘The blood of the Parisii tribe, who came from these very hills,’ she corrected. She was proud to claim that, for it was Mamo’s blood – even if Broc hated every drop, thinking it muddied his pure Roman aspirations with that shameful taint: the blood of the vanquished and dispossessed. He despised anything that looked back, not forward. The nights she and Mamo murmured the old stories to each other drove him mad.

‘I’m no kin to the wild men over the Wall in Alba,” she added firmly to the boys. ‘If you blurt that to your parents, they will have a fit.’ Everyone saw the Alba tribes as vile, savage beasts, and even when Mamo protested the Parisii came from the same bloodlines long ago, Broc scorned her foolishness. Well, now he would get to face the northerners himself, across the braced shaft of a spear.

Lucius had begun tearing around the bracken. ‘Minna’s a barbarian,’ he chanted.

‘Barbarian, barbarian,’ Marcus mimicked, jumping up and down.

‘Baby eater, baby eater!’

‘Lucius!’ Minna choked. ‘Wherever did you hear that?’

Lucius looked guiltily at his feet. ‘I heard a soldier say it in the city. About the men over the Wall.’

‘Hmm, well, don’t repeat that around your mother.’ Minna peered at Marcus, whose cheeks were scarlet. ‘Come and climb on my back. You’ve had enough sun.’

In the hazel woods along the stream it was cool. Minna rubbed her cheek on her shoulder and dug in the pockets of her dress for the remains of lunch – an apple and a broken piece of bread.

In honour of Mamo and that old blood, she would leave a harvest offering at the little shrine to the goddess of the stream. And she had something to beg for now.

Among the trees the stream formed a pool bedded with brown pebbles, and on its banks sat a small cairn. Wedged into the stones was the barley-doll from last year’s harvest, decorated with faded red ribbon, and dying flowers were tucked into the crevices.

The boys ran around as Minna cleared the dead flowers and picked daisies from a sunny clearing. ‘Lady,’ she murmured with bowed head, as Mamo had taught her, ‘take my offering in gratitude for your blessings, and may your eye continue to favour us all.’

Please. Especially favour me. Just this once. And I’ll never ask again.
Severus’s knowing smile was there before her, and she desperately squeezed her fingers over her eyes.

Mamo said she heard the Goddess speak in this place, yet nothing like that had ever happened to Minna. As a child she sat here for hours straining to hear, as if the Goddess might at any moment step out of the trees to whisper in her ear. In Mamo’s stories the old gods spoke: Minna was still waiting.

Instead, only the awake-dreams came to her. They took her when she stared for too long into fire, water or clouds. They interrupted her sleep, set apart from real dreams by the sense they came from outside her, and because of their terrible, vivid power. Minna could never remember them clearly, though. All they left was an echo of darkness and fear. And death – always the foreboding of death.

That night, the air in the house by the stream crackled with resentment. Sewing in her bed-box against the wall, Mamo frowned at Minna and Broc.

‘What is wrong?’ she asked.

But as Broc’s mouth opened, Minna glared him into silence. ‘Nothing,’ she said curtly. ‘Nothing that need trouble you, Mamo.’

Broc glanced at Mamo’s shrunken face, the trembling hands that pushed the bone needle through the wool shirt, and he visibly swallowed his words. Neither of them must upset Mamo. After the fevers she had suffered all summer she wasn’t strong enough.

Mamo coughed, one gnarled hand reaching for a pile of Broc’s socks to darn, and Minna was on her feet, pressing her back. ‘Leave that now, Mamo, and rest.’

Mamo clucked at the fussing, but Minna had a right to worry. Though she had given Minna her almond-shaped eyes, high cheekbones and pointed chin, her grandmother’s features were blurred by sagging, sallow skin now, and her fingers were as twisted and swollen as knots in an oak tree. She still sat upright against the pillow, though, and wore her white hair in six long Parisii braids, her frail carriage imbued with pride.

Minna turned away with a tight chest, her head brushing the bunches of dried leaves and roots tied to the roofbeams. She had been taught herb-lore by Mamo herself, and had been dosing her grandmother with strengthening tonics for months. She couldn’t face the fact they weren’t working.

Broc slugged his ale and pulled a face at her frown, and Minna turned her back to stir the pot of lentils and mutton over the fire-grate. Let him think her acquiescent; let him go off on his boy’s adventure, and then Mamo would surely come up with a way out of this. She would rally, she would plan and think and smile with Minna, as she always did.

And as for Minna, Mamo always said her mind was sharp as a thorn, swift as a river. But she had let that mind dull, drifting in summer dreams. Well, no more. As she stirred the stew, she vowed that never again would she be caught out like this.

Minna blinked as a dark shape passed across the stars.

Her bed was in a little room on the back of the house, looking over the hills, and she realized she was sitting cross-legged on it with the door open to the night. She had been awake-dreaming.

She cradled the familiar pain in her belly and peered up, recognizing Broc. ‘What … what did I say?’

Broc leaned against the door-jamb, looking out. ‘How, by the Christos, would I know?’

Her heart was tripping erratically. Sweat prickled her temples. ‘Did I scream?’

‘Once. That’s what brought me in here. Then you babbled some complete nonsense; I couldn’t even understand you.’ Disgust thickened his voice. ‘Honestly, Mamo has ruined you with these old stories. She fills your head with foolishness, and then you wonder why you get nightmares.’

She wrapped her arms about her knees. ‘I can’t help the visions. And Mamo gets them, too.’

Her grandmother, however, honoured the gift – the
sight
, as she called it – and her dreams were never violent.
Surrender to them
, Mamo said.
There must be some reason the Goddess speaks to you this way. You resist them, so they bring pain
. But Minna resisted because the dreams made people hate and fear her. Because she could not control them, no matter how she tried. She didn’t think any goddess would send such pain, anyway, and so sometimes, in her darkest hours, she wondered if the Christians had it right when they said such things were pagan and the work of devils.

‘Mamo has never used her
sight
in front of others,’ Broc pointed out. ‘And anyway, she’s old, and she is the herb-woman. People make allowances for her. But they’re afraid of you. Severus is the only one—’

‘Don’t say it!’ She hunched one shoulder away.

Broc squatted before her, a finger raising her chin. ‘It’s done, sister.’ He sighed. ‘I must do my duty and give you a dowry, however small, to make it legal, though that will have to wait until next month for my first pay. But I’ve agreed now in principle, and Master Publius has given his assent. I will tell Mamo tomorrow.’

Minna stared into the darkness.

‘I will give you one last piece of advice. Apply yourself to learning from Mistress Flavia: start dressing like a lady, acting like a lady, speaking like a lady. Stop racing around the fields with your skirt hitched up. You’re a woman, not a child. Forget Mamo’s tales and strive to control these bizarre … turns. Then people might start to accept you.’

Minna gazed into her brother’s face. She thought of how they played together in the heather as children, how he had defended her from the worst taunts. But now she realized with a sinking feeling that after all those years, Broc did not know her soul at all, not if he honestly thought she could ever be that woman.

‘Don’t waste this chance!’ he urged. ‘At least try, Minna, to change. Just try.’

Heavy as stone, her heart followed her belly down. She turned her face towards the star glitter, beckoning beyond this house. ‘Yes, brother,’ she agreed. For she understood now he would not know that she lied.

Two days later Broc left for the Wall.

Chapter 2

‘I
t looks as though there will be a storm, Mamo,’ Minna observed from the doorway. She leaned her head against the cool stone wall.

Across the stubbled fields the sky was bruised. The air lay in a damp blanket over the dusky hollows, exuding the scents of turned soil and crushed grain. No wind stirred the turning leaves or the brown grass that grew so high on the pasture – ripe for running through. Four weeks ago, Minna may have done just that. Before Broc leaving, and the daily war she had been waging to avoid Severus. Before Mamo’s crackling cough had deepened into this stubborn fever.