Dreaming the Eagle (51 page)

They were on a downhill slope, taking care to keep Ardacos level, when Breaca realized she could see the outline of her hand and her foot beneath it and that dawn must be coming. She looked for Caradoc and saw his hair, pale as waving corn. He smiled and his teeth showed white. Blackhaired Braint, at the far end of the stretcher, was still too dark to be seen.

At the foot of the slope, Gwyddhien gathered them. ‘We will be at the gates by full light. Even with wounded, we must make a good entrance.’

They were tired and untidy, a ragged cluster of half-seen shapes. She sharpened them into three rows, ranked by age and experience, with spears slung behind in the sign of peace. Of Ardacos, she said, ‘We will stop at the oak before the gateway. Bring him forward then. He is still the greatest of us. He should enter first.’

It was an act of honour worthy of them both. In the eyes of some, he may have been greatest when they left, but Gwyddhien was returning as the Warrior, none of them doubted it. Breaca bent down to the stretcher and found the wounded man awake. He winked as he had once before. She kept her hand on her spear and did not let down her guard.

The remaining ground was known to them all: a brief run of rolling gorse-covered hills and minor valleys filled with willow and hazel. Of the two streams, the nearer was crossed with stepping stones and the farther by a bridge.

The first of the spears fell as they passed Ardacos across the stones. Breaca heard the grunt and wheeze of a hit and jumped the last two steps to the far bank without thinking. Caradoc, who held the back end of the stretcher, jumped with her and ran as she did. They sprinted untidily for the shelter of a hawthorn. Braint dashed to join them, hurling herself face down in the turf.

‘Venutios is hit,’ she said.

‘What?’

Caradoc said, ‘I saw him go down. The spears were aimed at him.’

‘Gods. Why?’ Breaca stretched out from the hiding place and tried to count heads. On the open ground, she might have seen them. Here, in the shelter of the valley with the trees still in autumn leaf and the remains of night still upon them, it was impossible. Only Gwyddhien was visible, lying flat in the poor shelter of a rock. Breaca put her cupped hands to her mouth and blew the cry of the night owl, the call of the warriors of Mona. Gwyddhien returned it and ran to join them.

Breaca said, ‘Venutios is down.’

‘I know. I saw. You were last to cross apart from him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then at least we are all on the right side of the river.’

Gwyddhien made the owl’s cry, louder. Others answered in twos and threes and gathered, slowly.

Cumal of the Cornovii arrived first behind the rock. ‘Ordovices!’ He spat on the ground at Caradoc’s feet. Their peoples were ancient enemies. ‘I would know their spears anywhere. Did you know of this?’

Caradoc stared at the other man. With quiet deliberation, he turned to look across the river at the fallen shape of Venutios. The warrior lay sprawled on his back, his limbs at unhinged angles. The shaft of a single spear rose above him. Turning back, Caradoc was stiffly formal. ‘Forgive me. The light is too poor to see from here but I was close when the spears fell and I believe they bore the mark of the horned god on the haft.’

‘No, they were Coritani,’ said Breaca. ‘Unless the Cornovii have taken the mark of the red hawk for their own?’

Braint said, ‘Votadini. They mark them black and use poison stewed from mushrooms on the points. I have known them since childhood. They killed my mother’s uncle.’

There was silence. A jackdaw flew down to Venutios and was scared away by a flung branch.

Stone-white, Gwyddhien said, ‘Then the spears are sent by the dreamers, as were the bears. Why would the dreamers kill their own?’ Unspoken, but more clearly, was, Why would Airmid?

Breaca said, harshly, ‘Ask Venutios if you should happen to meet him in the lands of the dead. He must have known of the risk and we should have thought of it. Many more died in other years than would have been killed by a bear.’ She blamed herself, because it was safer than blaming anyone else, even a dreamer who had taken a bet when she might instead have given a warning. A bitter anguish curdled her guts, but dully, as if, once faced, it might prove overwhelming.

‘Then what now?’ asked Gwyddhien. ‘We can’t kill the dreamers.’

‘Can we not if they can kill us?’ Breaca rounded on the group. Two dozen faces doubted her. In the grey light, even Caradoc looked uncertain. She had thought him immune to fear and was shocked to find it not so. The dreamers of Mona were sacred, bound in a web of peace; they could walk through war from one side to the other and no warrior would lift a blade against them. She felt the unravelling of the weave that had made the thirty whole and prayed to Briga, and to Nemain, who cared most closely for Airmid. In answer, she saw only Ardacos, dying, and the Warrior already dead and the wrongness of it chilled her to the core. She called for Eburovic and the elder grandmother and neither came. Despairing, she called for Airmid, not for the living dreamer, but for the sense of her that enfolded like a second skin and gave support when it most was needed. The night gave nothing back, and less than nothing; in the dark was an echoing silence that leached at her will. Here on the gods’ isle, on a night warped by the gods’ touch, she was alone, abandoned by those she trusted most, who wielded instead the gods’ power against her.

The knowledge of betrayal was crippling. She stared out beyond the stretch of hawthorn to the willows that flanked the second stream. A fine mist drifted forward at knee height, coldly insidious. She had never craved death, as ‘Tagos had done in the first months after he lost his arm, but she saw it approach and did not have the will to resist.

Hail nudged at her hand, shoving his head against her palm. Alone of all of them, he did not harbour doubt or fear the dreamers, did not distinguish between the good and bad of a battle. He lived only to hunt and kill, to fight and win. Crouching, she dug her fingers in the harsh hair of his neck. Eburovic might be denied her but none could rob her of the memory of the hound’s birth, of the sight of Ban in the doorway of the women’s place, fresh from the dream, wild-eyed and lost, aching for a soul he barely knew, but already loved; her little brother who had yearned to be a warrior when everyone else had clearly seen that he was destined to be the greatest dreamer the tribes had ever known, until a single act of treachery cut him short. From Ban, it was a short step to anger, to fury, to a consuming rage. Two years of Mona’s teaching had schooled her to prevent passion from overriding reason, but Mona had brought her to this and her teachers had known of it and said nothing. In defiance, she nurtured the spark that burned in her core and could be fed so very easily: by her loathing of Amminios, by the memory of their first meeting, of his sacrifice of the dun filly, of his final act of desecration, by the sound of his laughter ringing in her ears, until there blazed within a fire that could destroy anything that stood in her way.

Shaking, she stood and looked round with a clarity that made nonsense of the indecision just past. The mist burned away, a phantom of her fear. The remains of the thirty watched her, warily, as if she, too, might be unreal. She smiled and saw those closest flinch. Choosing her words with care, she said, ‘If this is the dreamers’ work, then it is part of the test. We are the warriors of Mona. They have spent years training us for battle. If we are to die, then it should be with honour and in action, not standing like bulls in a pen awaiting slaughter.’ She lifted her spear with the point upright, for battle. ‘I will fight the dream-spears alone if necessary, but it would go better in company. Who will fight them with me?’

The pause could be counted by the hammer of her heart and might have been eternity. At the end of it, a voice behind her said, ‘I will,’ and Caradoc stepped forward to her side, closing a door too long left open. She smiled at him, light-headed, and he returned it, and she was reminded of a moment in a river when death had held them and had chosen to let them go. With commendable practicality, he said, ‘We’ll need other weapons. Spear against spear is no way to win a fight. We need blades and shields to do it properly.’

‘The armoury is on this side of the compound. We are twenty-nine, less the wounded. Ten will be enough to carry what we need.’ Braint stood not far away. Breaca put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Will you risk your life to retrieve your blade?’

The girl was vividly alert. Her grief at her cousin’s death had turned readily to anger and the need for action. She grinned, savagely. ‘Anything.’

‘Good. That’s three. We need seven more. Not the wounded.’

Braint was youngest of them. The others would not allow her courage to be greater than theirs. None refused to join her.

Gwyddhien recovered her composure and her ability to plan ahead. She said, ‘The armoury is too exposed. If they are waiting, you will need a diversion to keep their attention elsewhere.’ She pointed through the gloom. ‘There’s a stand of willow that leads to the edge of the second stream. You take your ten to the armoury. I’ll take the rest and we’ll make as if to cross there. You can break in while we do it.’

Breaca felt herself balanced, as if on a high wall, with a clear view of those gathered below. Without conscious effort, she could place each of the twenty-five warriors that remained uninjured of the chosen, and sense the quality of their courage. Ardacos lay in the lee of the hawthorns. His dark eyes met hers with no hint of fear. She said, ‘Someone must stay with Ardacos. We have not brought him so far to lose him.’

‘I’ll stay. If you help me move him behind the rocks and give me six others, we can keep him safe for as long as you will need.’ It was Caradoc. Even as she regretted the loss of him, she knew he was the only one she could rely on to protect the wounded man. She nodded. ‘We’ll leave our spears with you. We’ll have enough to carry coming back and you’ll use them better here.’

They moved Ardacos without difficulty. As the groups began to part, Gwyddhien raised her hand to hold her group. ‘We need a signal to time the diversion right.’

‘Wait here.’

Nine spears fell as Breaca sprinted the breadth of the river stones and another dozen as she returned. Each, to her, had the stench and style of the Coritani, remembered from her youth. She flung herself into the lee of the rock and held her prize aloft for all to see.

‘The Warrior’s horn.’ It was the length of her arm and gently curved. The two ends were bound with plain, unadorned silver and the horn itself had been polished over the generations to a warm translucency that caught the first cold glimmer of dawn and made of it a fire that joined her own. Looping the thong about her neck, she said, ‘I’ll blow the call to war when we have the blades. Meet us back here to collect them. Then we will see who throws spears that change in the dark.’

‘And before that?’ asked Gwyddhien. ‘You can’t blow the horn when you reach the armoury. You’ll call trouble on yourselves too early.’

Breaca grinned. The promise of battle coursed through her, burning clear the threat of betrayal. ‘Has Airmid taught you the call of the croaking frog?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Then use it. Three times and three again. When the last one calls, we’ll break in. Pray for us and we’ll bring you weapons.’

A brown-skinned frog croaked in an eastern marsh and was answered by its mate. In the colourless pre-dawn light, a hand was raised in long grass and swung forward. Ten warriors and a hound slid, belly-down, like lizards, across dew-sodden turf.

The compound was quiet. Smoke rose thinly from night fires. Hounds and cockerels slept. A small, stone-built hut, slate-roofed for protection from fire, stood midway between one greathouse and the next. The door was wooden and hinged and prone to squeal whenever it moved - except this time, when a young, blackhaired warrior of the Brigantes clamped fat from a hunted boar to the openings and silenced them. Three warriors entered, one wiping boar-fat from her hands. The interior was blacker than the night had been but they had practised many times finding their weapons blindfold for an occasion not unlike this. They sought out blades and passed them, hilt first, to those waiting outside, knowing each by the shape of the pommel. Shields were harder to name. Each bore the Warrior’s mark of the leaping salmon on the face, blue against grey, with personal marks etched only lightly on boss or handle, too faintly to be seen. In the absence of better direction, twenty-nine shields were picked at random and handed out, and the one found that was different and special. Bearing three blades and three shields each and with the hound leaping ahead to warn of danger, they ran back to the rock whence they had come. Those protecting Ardacos had been attacked. Two of the defenders lay wounded but not dead and were left on guard with those three already injured. With the blades and shields passed to those who could use them, Breaca raised the Warrior’s horn to her lips, filled her lungs and blew the call to battle.

Breaca ordered her half of the line. They walked forward, shields overlapping, blades raised and ready. For the last time, they bore the leaping salmon in blue that was the mark of Venutios who had been Warrior and was dead. His shield alone had been different from theirs: the salmon was etched deeply on the boss and inlaid with blue stones. Breaca had wanted to take it to him but had been overruled by Gwyddhien and Caradoc together; it was too close to dawn for her to do it unseen and the horn had been blown with a force that could be heard across the island; they were at war and the time for the dead was later, if there were any left alive to tend them. The shield had been left instead with Ardacos, who had been given his own blade and helped to sit. At his own request, they had strapped the shield to his side so that his wounded arm would not be the death of him. He had grinned as they left and pledged his life to theirs, as a warrior should.

The remains of the thirty made a steep-sided crescent, like the hunting but steeper, a formation that gave each protection by a neighbour but offered the chance to win honour alone with a single charge. Gwyddhien took the centre as was her right. Breaca, by virtue of her actions, had won the right flank, the place of next greatest honour. Caradoc had been given the left and had tried to take Braint as his shieldmate but had resigned her to Breaca and taken instead Cumal, the Cornovian who had spat on his feet.