Dreaming the Hound (62 page)

‘Breathe carefully,’ he said, ‘if you wish to breathe at all.’

Dark eyes glanced at him sideways, their rims white as a hunted doe. In Latin, the youth said, ‘I am a scout for the Twentieth legion, stationed at Camulodunum. I am seeking Corvus, prefect of the Twentieth—’

Valerius shook his head. ‘Wrong guess,’ he said softly, and leaned’ on the blade.

‘… Boudica …’

The word was a hiss, in the face of dying. Flesh trembled under Valerius’ hand and it was hard not to kill out of instinct. Longinus was there. He put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. ‘Steady.’

Both of those were not enough. What stayed his hand was the sight of the brooch pinned to the boy’s cloak: a serpent-spear cast in silver, with three threads of blackened wool hanging from the lower loop.

Biting his lip, Valerius eased back on the knife’s pressure, ‘That brooch,’ he said. ‘Where did you get it?’

‘Boudica’s … daughter.’ The scout’s windpipe was part severed. Blood foamed at the cut. ‘I… hold the life of … the Boudicaa’s child.’

‘How?’ Dark eyes closed and opened again. ‘My life for hers. Your oath on it.’ A whisper, sprayed red.

Valerius laughed. He moved his knife up and back, to rest below the scout’s lip. Against corded, futile resistance, he pushed down with his other hand on the back of the boy’s head, forcing him slowly forward until the tip of his knife met the solid stop of bone. The youth groaned through tight teeth as the acolytes of Mithras used to do at their first branding.

Blood pulsed freely onto the back of Valerius’ hand. ‘You haven’t been long with the legions, have you?’ he said. ‘Information comes free to whomsoever holds the knife. I think we might have it without the oaths.’

‘No time …’ The boy’s eyes grew wide at the centres. Astonishingly, a spark of humour lingered in their core. ‘I will die and she will die. Her death … will be worse.’

He might have died then for the sheer effrontery of it, but the hound came to lick the blood from his lip and he saw it and jerked away as he had not done from the knife, terror naked on his face.

Longinus said, quietly, ‘Valerius, he can see your hound.’

‘I noticed.’ Valerius drew back his hand. His knife was level with the boy’s eye. It, too, was beyond the legal length and honed back at the blade, like the skinning knives of the dreamers, that they used to find the truth. The scout recognized that, too, and it scared him almost as much as the hound.

Valerius said, ‘I will know if you lie to me. Do you believe that?’

‘Yes.’

They made him sit and bound his hands and ankles. He was no longer bleeding from his throat, but his lower lip had swollen to the size of a slingstone where Valerius had cut it and the blood had pooled beneath the skin.

Valerius crouched in front of him, holding the knife. ‘Talk to me.’

Heron-clouds speared the sky, pushed by an easterly breeze.

Breaca could not see them, only feel them, as if they reached down to her, with memories of the wind.

Memories; nothing seen. It was a long time since she had seen anything but oak and lately not that. Darkness was better, although sweat stung her eyes and the light hurt when she blinked it away. That was a new kind of pain, a layer on the other layers, one that could be made better when the rest could not.

Nothing made better the pain in her back, her shoulders, her arms. Breathing hurt and not breathing hurt and cursing and not cursing. She had not yet found if screaming made any difference, but would do so, soon. In the beginning, a small part of her had wanted to scream, to rage against the shock, the indignity, the stripping of her pride, but her pride was the greater part and had not allowed it. Now, the greater part of her needed release and only a small, waning kernel of something not yet broken kept her silent.

Soon she would break, but not yet. Not yet. Not yet. The voice in her head, which had once been at least partly her own, was now entirely the ancestor-dreamer’s. It kept up the litany.

Not yet. This is the beginning. The rest will be worse; don’t bring it sooner.

She could not imagine worse. This much was more than she could bear. She opened her mouth and breathed in hot, sweating air and—

Not yet.

She closed her mouth and choked on sweat and old spit and somewhere, somebody laughed and she remembered that they could see her and for a moment, she took the weight on her legs, not her arms, and pressed her forehead to the oak and made the feel of it count against the stunning, blinding, nauseating, endless, endless, endless pain.

A blaze of lightning struck her arms, above her head, and she forgot about her weight and slumped against the ties and the lightning struck her back again, adding pain to infinite pain and the oak was gone and all sense of safety and she opened her mouth and took a breath—

Not yet.

—and closed it again. “

Not yet. You have too much pride. You should listen to me.

‘I did listen to you. I came east to lead the war host as you told me. I am here now because of it.’

The torc lay like an iron clamp on her neck. She had thought the procurator would take it; certainly he had fingered it, had estimated its value as she had: melted to gold it would pay a century of men for a summer of months, or a half-century for— That way out did not work any longer. The lightning strikes-across her back did not allow it. The ancestor-dreamer stood by and watched.

Breaca said, ‘Why did you lie to me? You promised a war host, and freedom.’

No. I promised only that I would be with you, which I am, and that I would give you death if you asked it. Do you ask it?

‘No. Never.’ It was good to rage at something other than the pain, however unreasonably. ‘You give nothing freely and I will not pay your price.’

Not even to save the life of your daughter?

There was darkness, and a blink of salted pain, and the lightning strikes and all of it was lost in the memory of Graine’s voice, and the silence when it had ended. Breaca said, ‘You did not come to me last night when I sought you.’

And instead, I come to you now.

‘What do you offer?

‘ The life of your child.

‘What do you ask?’

What I have always asked, that you come to me shorn of your arrogance, that you abandon the walls you have built about yourself and see what there is to see behind them.

‘What point, when I am about to die?’

Would you go ignorant to the lands beyond life, never knowing who you were born to? Would you— The pain pressed on her, driving her into darkness. It was difficult to hear anything clearly, even the voice in her head. The black became darker, muddier, the ancestor more urgent. Come to me, bringer of victory. Come. I am not so far away now.

Come to me. Come to me. Come to … And breathe. Only breathe, because someone had emptied a bucket of water on her

head and the cold was as shocking as the lightning strikes and it was all she could do to take a breath and open her mouth and—

Not yet. Come to me. Follow the dark.

There was no dark. Only the lightning, which was red, and the hurtful blink of an eye.

Come to me. I am here to hold you. Only follow the dark.

Something had to break; the small kernel of pride was too small to survive. Caught in the vortex of the lightning, broken by the agony in her arms, Breaca of the Eceni, bearer of the serpent-spear, let go of her pride and, for the sake of her daughter, followed the thread of a voice she did not trust into the dark.

She was in a cave and the ancestor was in the cave with her and it was not the cave of rock and running water in the high mountains east of Mona, but a safe place, where the kernel of herself might shelter against assault and not break, at least for a while.

Welcome. The ancestor was old beyond all imagining and the serpent of her dreaming lived within her. She was vast, and made herself small, that she might be approached without terror. Welcome. We could both wish you had come to me sooner.

‘I did not know how. And had not the need.’

The laugh became part of her. You have had the need since you were a child, only that your pride would not allow it.

At another time, she might have argued against that, but her pride had got in the way of too many things to catalogue and there was not time to list them now. Caught in the quiet cave, in a miracle of no-pain, or of a pain so entirely consuming that it had swamped her and she was already dying, she reached out to the ancient past.

‘What must I do?’

Come to know who you are. What else is there anyone can do?

Cunomar watched his mother lose consciousness the first time, and be made to feel again with the water, and then slump again soon after.

He thought she might have died, and prayed for it, but the staggered rise and fall of her chest said that she had only gone for a time beyond reach and could be brought back again with more water. The mercenaries thought the same. One took the bucket to the horse trough and filled it and would have dashed it on her as

he had before, but the procurator stepped forward and stayed his arm.

‘Stop. Enough. If she dies now …’ He tapped his forefingers to his lips, thinking, then said, ‘Cut her down. Lie flat the crosses for the others. If she hears her daughters raised up she will wake. Bring them—’

A horse, ridden hard, came up the trackway. Two horses; a second followed, with three others, so five altogether. It helped to count things, to keep his attention elsewhere; Cunomar was learning that.

The first of the incomers swung through the gates, turning too tightly for safety. A normal horse, pulled round so hard, might have fallen. This one gathered itself on the turn and stopped where was needful, in front of the stanchion, missing by a hand’s breadth the fallen body of the woman lying limp on the ground.

Cunomar gaped and closed his eyes and opened them and stared again. The horse was pied, the two colours of a frost-laden night. The rider bore the leather armour and blue cloak of a Roman messenger, with the oak leaf in gold pinned under his chin that said he came from the governor. He swept off his helmet and the hair beneath was black and the profile could have been Luain mac Calma’s made younger and harder and assailed more by life.

Cunomar closed his mouth and swallowed, drily. His mind caught up late with his memories. Hoarsely, he said, ‘Valerius?’

‘What? Gods, it is.’ Ardacos jerked in the shackles, sending a ripple down the line of men.

Ardacos never showed surprise, or fear, or anger, or pride, or hate; until now when the loathing in his voice would have stripped a lesser man to the skin. ‘Traitor. He’s come to gloat.’ He shouted it aloud. ‘Traitor!’

The she-bears took up the shout, and Gunovar; none of them knew who the stranger was, only that life was ending and this man had come to watch it and Ardacos, whom they revered, clearly hated him.

Airmid looked on, distractedly, as if recently woken from dreaming, or perhaps not woken at all. She said three words to Gunovar and both of them shouted it. ‘Traitor! Nemain bind you!’ Their trained voices carried over the she-bears’ and roused more amusement in the men guarding them, which was understandable; they had shouted in Latin.

The messenger - Valerius - ignored them as he had ignored the bleeding body of the Boudica lying prone beneath his horse’s feet. Without dismounting, he presented himself as was proper to the procurator, neatly and only a little out of breath.

‘The governor sends his greetings and his word.’ The message satchel at his shoulder was sealed with wax and the elephant-seal of Britannia, that it was death to break unbidden. ‘If you would care to read the message privately?’

‘Thank you.’ The procurator clearly did not care to do so at all if it interrupted his morning, but could not be seen to say so. He delayed, while the messenger’s companion ploughed through the gateway leading three pack horses. The newcomer swept off his helmet to reveal a mass of astonishingly rich russet hair.

The veterans made space for the incomer, pleasantly jocular, and there was a small moment of chaos when too many horses took up too much space and Valerius’ horse, which had been ridden hardest, threw its head restlessly against the hold of the reins and jumped sideways, so that it jostled the procurator.

The emperor’s collector of taxes was not used to being jostled, and was deeply afraid of the horse. He ducked sideways, swearing. ‘Carefully, man. Can’t you get that beast—’

The sword-blade that rested along his throat was polished and honed and it had already broken his skin. The black eyes of the man above it were the epitome of vicious, lethal arrogance. The man in messenger’s dress, who had just this moment been so polite, said with freezing clarity, ‘My horse is battle trained. If you move, I will have him kill you. It will be spectacular, and faster than you deserve, but… I really don’t think so. Driscus, call your men into order. You will die first if they assault us. Thank you, Longinus …’

For this last, he cast his voice past the procurator to the mercenary veterans gathered beyond the stanchion. Not quite fast enough, they had seen the risk to their patron and would have come to his aid, but for the fact that Driscus, their leader, had also moved too slowly and had been relieved of his sword in a single swift manoeuvre by the cavalryman with the russet hair and was staring at the point of it, a little cross-eyed. Blood drizzled from a horizontal cut on his forehead. His men shifted uneasily, and waited for an order.

‘Better.’ Valerius nodded, pleasantly. As if the procurator did not exist, he looked past the empty stanchion to the swordless mercenary. ‘Driscus, I may have grown my hair since you last saw me, in which case you are forgiven for not remembering the man who had you flogged three times in one winter for being drunk on

duty, but I am devastated that you don’t remember the horse that took the better half out of your sword arm and put you under the care of Theophilus for a month.’

The man Driscus stared and frowned and stared, then, ‘Valerius? It can’t be. You’re dead. You died in Gaul. Corvus told us. I paid two sesterces towards your memorial.’

‘You flatter my memory.’ Valerius sketched a salute. ‘Even so, I am not dead. Anyone who wishes to risk losing their arm to the Crow-horse can come close to test it. Or you could make better use of the time and pack whatever gold you have collected and leave now for Camulodunum.’