Dreaming the Serpent-Spear Read online

  “I know. And perhaps when the warriors are ready, I will be ready also. In the meantime, there’s something else that must be done first. Valerius found my sword, the one my father made for me with the serpent-spear on the hilt. If I’m ever going to be able to fight again, it will be with that blade. He hid it in the woods the day he came to stop the procurator. I want to go out now and find it. If Airmid is wrong and sleeping will not heal your dreaming, would you come with me instead?”

  The look on her daughter’s face was enough. Breaca reached for the tunic that lay at the bedside. A thought gave her pause. “Will Hawk let you get up if I ask him?”

  For the first time, Graine’s smile held some warmth in it, and the knowing of a child who sees things her mother does not. With exaggerated patience, she said, “Hawk’s only alive because you told Ardacos not to let anyone kill him. The she-bears would have slain him otherwise, or at least taken both of his ears. He owes you his life and his beauty and knows it. For the rest of his life, he’ll do whatever you ask of him.”

  “Then I’ll tell him where we’re going so he can tell Airmid and Valerius. We’ll have to leave Stone; he isn’t well enough to run beside a horse yet. Can you ask him to stay, do you think, so we don’t have to tie him to the doorpost?”

  CHAPTER 3

  The horse paddocks lay to the west, a shifting of purpled silhouettes, soft-edged in the dusk. Gorse hedges in early flower circled the margins, showing flashes of acid yellow amidst the greys. A wicker gate opened in one corner and a rope halter hung on a hook beside it. A trio of long-legged fillies waited there, huffing white breath into the dusk.

  Breaca moved them back and slid the halter instead onto a solid dun cob that had been her gift to Graine in the autumn before ’Tagos’ death. It was the steadiest horse she had ever seen under saddle, entirely safe for a horse-shy child who was lost riding the battle mounts of her family. It remained steady at the mounting stone while she lifted Graine up, then caught a fistful of coarse black mane and hauled herself on behind.

  They rode due west at a steady walk, into the setting sun. Breaca held one arm round her daughter’s waist, mourning the skeletal thinness of a child who had never been warrior-fit, but had always been healthy. The small head rested on her breastbone and she felt her own heart rebound against the weight of her daughter’s skull.

  They had passed beyond the margins of the paddocks when Graine said, “We need to turn a little north of here, and go faster, or we’ll be lost in the dark.”

  “Do we? I’m not sure I can ride any faster than this.”

  A fragment of conversation, overhead, sounded again in her ears. Riding a horse after a flogging is not as hard as walking, and both are better than lying in bed.

  She had overheard Valerius say that to Cunomar, or Ardacos perhaps. He knew these things. He had been flogged more than once and had ordered it done to other men, and helped them heal afterwards.

  On the strength of that, she nudged the cob into a canter. Three paces later, she stopped. Her brother was right in part; it was easier to ride than to walk. It was not easier to ride fast.

  Tactfully, Graine said, “It might be all right to go slowly.”

  “I think so. Perhaps later, we can try going faster again.” Breaca quickened the walk, and turned a little north. Presently, she said, “How do you know where we’re going?”

  “I was in your hut still when Valerius told you how the god came to him in the shape of the bull with the moon between its horns to guide him to where your blade was hidden, and how he had hidden it again himself afterwards, before he came here. You got out of bed before he’d finished speaking, and asked him to lend you his horse. You fell off and they brought you back and that was when the fever began and they thought you were going to die.”

  “Is it? I’d forgotten that. I thought it was a fever-dream.”

  “But you remember now?”

  “I do, yes. Thank you.”

  Already, the sun was a red nail paring on the horizon. Streaks of bloody light leaked into the uncolour of the night. Graine’s hair was liquidly black, framing her face. The path along which they rode grew harder to see with each passing footfall, but never quite impossible.

  They came eventually to an oval clearing surrounded by a clutch of hawthorn and hazel that had been coppiced at the edges and left to grow wild in its heart, for the gods of the ancestors, and all who followed after them. Deer tracks led through to the centre, narrowly, so that thorns tugged Breaca’s tunic away from the ruined flesh on her back. Riding was still better than walking, but less so.

  The dun cob stopped alongside a fallen oak. Breaca dismounted onto it. Her feet sank into rotting wood and the smell rose up around her, pleasantly mellow. She lifted Graine down and let her lead on, following the fine line of a path. From a little ahead, where clustering hawthorns snagged the light, Graine said, “There’s a stream here, about half a spear’s length wide. Can we jump it?”

  “I don’t know. We can try.”

  So small a thing to give them pause. A month before, either one would have crossed without stopping to think. Breaca stood at the stream’s edge listening to the curdling water and wondered if Valerius had sent her this way deliberately as a test. In his own way, he was as hard as the ancestor dreamer.

  From her side, Graine said, “Airmid has always said that the gods answer certainty, not fear.”

  Breaca made herself smile. “Did I seem fearful? I’m sorry. I was wondering whether you wanted to jump with me or for me to carry you over. If you do, it might be easier to wade through.” That much was easy to imagine; the stream was not deep.

  “No. I want to jump it, to know that I can.” Graine was already shifting her weight from one foot to the other, as if the distance from one bank to the other were three times as wide. “I’ll go on my own,” she said, and did so, unprettily, landing in a sprawl on the far side.

  Breaca followed, having no choice. Breathing carefully, she crouched by her daughter. Graine was pale and her fists clenched tight. Breaca said, “Are you hurting?”

  “No.” The lie was not to be challenged. Frowning, Graine looked up through the trees to where the full moon made sharp silhouettes of the branches. She said, “We should go quickly. The clouds will cover the moon by midnight.”

  “You should lead, then. You can remember what Valerius said better than I can.”

  The woods were quiet, as if their presence were unusual, and something to be watched. They walked awhile along the water’s edge and then cut inward, following a track through the thickening jumble of undergrowth to another, far older, clearing where ancient trees hung with scabs of lichen formed the margins. Here, the stream spread to become a small pool and a hazel grew up from the bank, dipping branches downwards to trail long-twigged fingers across the water.

  Breaca caught hold of Graine’s hand and skirted the pool to stand in the moon shadow of the hazel. The stream ran in slowly, filtered through sphagnum moss. The surface of the water was a languid mirror reflecting the tree and the night sky. The moon made an unbroken circle with the hare on its surface so complete as to be alive: creature of Nemain, made real on the water that was her domain.

  Coming new to such a place, Breaca dared to hope: a dreamer could see the breath of the gods in a pool such as this, or a violated child, perhaps, who had lost her dreaming.

  Because she knew her daughter very well, she felt the moment when exactly that thought occurred also to Graine. She felt the same hope, sharper and less curtailed, course through the small frame, and then the desperate, damaging disappointment at the recoil just after. She opened her mouth to speak and found no words and looked down at the child’s blank mask of a face and was glad she had kept silent.

  Graine found her own way out. The small, sweaty hand tightened in Breaca’s, drawing her away from the water’s edge. She said, “The flat stone Valerius spoke of is nine paces west of the gods’ tree. You’ll have to make the strides. Mine are not long enough.”


  “Come with me. You can count as we go.”

  Counting aloud, they paced away from the pool towards the trees at the far edge of the clearing. Halfway between water and wood, they stopped. Dead leaves lay in flurries at their feet. Breaca knelt and swept them aside with the edge of her hand. Underneath, a flat plate of green-grey moss, longer than a man’s arm and half as wide, showed where a stone lay flush with turf.

  A winter’s leaving of silt bound the edges to the earth on all sides. Valerius had said that he used his sword blade to lift it. Lacking a sword, Breaca slid her belt knife all the way round. Iron grated on stone but the gap was still not enough to hook in her fingers. She looked around for something else to act as a lever.

  Graine, squatting beside her, picked at a corner of the moss. “There’s a carving on the stone’s face,” she said.

  “Is there?” A hawthorn branch lay nearby, split from the parent tree by winter storms and still green enough to be strong. Breaca hefted it and set her blade to sharpen the wider end. “Can you clear the moss and see what it looks like?”

  She whittled at the end of the stake until the density of her daughter’s silence drew her back. Lifting her head, she said, “Beloved, what have you found?”

  “It’s an altar, an old one, from the time of the ancestors.”

  She should have known. Around them, a wood lay silent when it should have been most filled with life. Water whispered into the gods’ pool and out again, leaving the surface undisturbed. Black as a hare’s eye, as flawless and pure, the water caught the moon and held it fast in a ring of trees so ancient, so clearly god-filled, they had resisted even the Roman axes in a land starved of wood.

  Slowly, carefully, Breaca laid her part-carved hawthorn branch on the grass. The hairs on her arms stood erect, pulling gooseflesh in their wake.

  “Should we leave?” she asked. “I think I can find a quicker way back to where we left your pony, one that doesn’t take us past the pool.”

  Her daughter shook her head. “I don’t think we need to do that. Come and look at the carving.”

  Graine’s fingernails were black. Moss lay in broken handfuls on the turf. The stone that had held it was gritty with mud and earth, smeared into arcs where a small hand had tried to scrub it clear and had instead forced the loam into the depths of the markings so that the shape carved on it stood out as if newly painted.

  There, facing Breaca in the middle of the gods’ wood, was the symbol that had followed her from childhood through all the disparate parts of her adulthood, as Warrior of Mona, as the Boudica, co-leader of the western tribes with Caradoc, as Breaca of Mona and, later, of the Eceni, as Breaca, mother to her children, as the Boudica, un-leader of a gathering war host. Through all of these the serpent-spear had been her mark. It came to her again now, on a moss-covered stone, in a form that was entirely new.

  Kneeling, she traced a finger along its lines. A two-headed serpent looped back on itself, staring to past and future. A crooked spear lay angled across, joining the gods to the earth. Beyond it, the twin-headed serpent and the spear that crossed it were encircled by the most ancient of the gods’ marks: a zigzag line with moon dots above and below that staked a claim to this one sign and made it far more than simply the mark of a god-gifted warrior, or even the dream of an ancestor, however ancient and wise.

  Hoarsely, Breaca said, “This is Briga’s. The mark and the altar, both.”

  She sat back on her heels. Pain and the crossing of rivers was forgotten. Her hawthorn stake lay untouched by her side. For years, she had believed the mark her own, a gift of the elder grandmother, and had painted it on her shield and on her horses in battle so that it had become one with the Boudica’s name. Only later, in the year of Graine’s birth, had she found that it had belonged to the ancestor-dreamer long before that.

  It should have come as no surprise that, before all the others, it had belonged to Briga, mother to all the gods, holder of life and death, god of battles, of childbirth, of the smith’s craft, of poetry; the god who lived as the serpent did, on the cusp of life and death, bringing one into the other, as the spear did in battle, as the serpent did, easing from one skin to the next, and one life to the next, leaving the ghost-shape of the old behind.

  As a warrior, as a mother, as a smith, Breaca had lived her life in Briga’s care. Even so, she had not expected to be so closely bound; a dreamer might be so, but she was not that.

  She hissed air through her teeth. “We should leave.”

  “No.” Graine came round to sit beside her, taking her hand. “Valerius has trained on Mona with Luain mac Calma and spent his long-nights in the dreaming chambers of Hibernia; he will have known what this was and he didn’t think it was unsafe when he needed a place to hide your blade. I think you should lift the stone.”

  The carved end of the hawthorn stake lay greenly white in the moonlight. Breaca jammed it under the long edge of the stone and used the hilt of her knife laid on the earth as a lever. Resisting at first and then easier, Briga’s altar stone rose from the earth.

  Mother and daughter worked together to free it. Graine stood on the end of the stake and Breaca moved to the far side to pull up on the long edge, straining lacerated muscles against the dead weight until it rose past the point where the earth drew it downwards and she could set it on end, balanced against the heel of her hand.

  Underneath, a black cavity gaped. The air that leaked out was damp and earthen and sharp with the tang of forged iron. Graine lay prone on the earth and reached in as far as she dared, and came out with her hands full, and again, and again. One after the other, she drew out five long, slim bundles, each bound about with oiled linen and rolled birch bark and thongs made of red bull’s hide. She laid them out in a line across the turf. A smear of mud marked her temple, the kiss of the god.

  The closeness of the iron was dizzying, the smell of rust and raw metal and the songs of making and battle that were in it. Breaca leaned the altar stone against her knee and reached down to untie the bull’s hide thongs that bound the bundle that was hers. The oiled linen was not yet stiff or mildewed by its time in the earth. It curled away in her fingers, laying a hand’s breadth of bright iron open to the moon.

  She needed two hands free. She lowered the altar stone to the earth. With the same quality of care she would have shown Graine in infancy, she peeled the rest of the linen from the blade that her father had made; his gift for the child-become-woman who was his daughter.

  Eburovic had forged the iron and beaten it out over days, matching the length and weight to the woman she would be. Later, he had cast the serpent-spear in bronze for the pommel, knowing nothing more of it than that Breaca had seen the mark in the dreaming of her long-nights, and that it should be on her blade.

  The sword that Briga’s mark adorned was older than any of the Boudica’s children, or any of her loves except Airmid, who had always been first. Breaca had borne it in battle for almost twenty years until it became a part of her, as necessary as the muscle and sinew and bone of her body.

  It came to her hand like a live thing, keening. The scar on her palm itched and then burned and she welcomed the pain as she would have welcomed the soft bite of a lover; something sharp and familiar that promised more if she could meet and match it.

  She was not at all sure that she could. The passion that was missing from her healing was exactly the part of her that had once most yearned to fight. Even now, she feared knowing the full measure of what was lost.

  From her place by the altar stone, Graine said, “The gods answer certainty, not fear.”

  Breaca stood, letting her hand hang by her side with the weight of the blade drawing her arm down and out. She rolled her shoulders, loosening them. Then, under Nemain’s moon, beside an altar to Briga, who ruled battle and death, with only her daughter for company, Breaca of the Eceni, bringer of victory to her people, set out to test the true limits of what she could do.

  Afterwards, she could not have said exactly
when she became aware that more eyes than Graine’s were watching her, only that there had been a sense of emptiness that was the gods’ watching, which became less empty, so that she did what she could to stretch further, and sweep more cleanly, and pushed her breathing and her broken body beyond what she had already done.

  Even so that, there came a time when it was necessary to stop. She made the last block and strike and counter-strike and let the blade’s tip fall slowly to touch the loamy earth.

  Facing the place where the less-emptiness waited, she said, “If I am not fit to lead the war host, will you do it in my place?”

  It had been a guess and a risk in the asking and there was a long, sweating wait before she was proved right.

  “It hasn’t come to that,” said her brother. “We have no need to discuss it.”

  Her brother, Valerius, officer of the Roman cavalry, who had once been Bán of the Eceni. Her last clear memory of him was from the ground, as he sat the horse he called Crow and spoke in coruscating Latin to the Roman procurator who lay between its feet. Moments later, he had slain the man with the horse. Half of her fevered dreams had been of the implacable rage of that killing.

  He stood now in the quiet light of the clearing and she looked at him properly for the first time. He was taller than she remembered, and leaner, but not as gaunt as he had been on the boat from Gaul, when she had wanted to kill him. His hair was long for a Roman, but short for Eceni, and he had not woven in the warrior’s braid at the side as he might have done. He wore an Eceni cloak over a Roman tunic and the blade at his belt was of his own making, shorter and slimmer than the great-blades of the Eceni warrior but longer than the auxiliary cavalry swords of his legionary past.

  His eyes were black, as they had always been, but far less troubled. He was a man caught on the dividing line between two worlds and he did not look badly for it. She remembered that he was given to Mithras, hidden god of the legions, as well as to Nemain.