CHAPTER 9

Bellos the Blind kept watch against the legions of Rome from the side of an unlit fire pit in the newly deserted great-house on Mona.

Cold kept him awake and his mind sharp when the too-familiar smells of hearth and peat and thatch and the jostling afterthoughts of the departed warriors and dreamers might have lulled him to inattention. So many men and women had lived in the great-house and the settlement around it, so many children had been born, so many of the old and the not-old had died where Bellos now sat. Each had carved something on the roof beams and each had left behind the imprint of thoughts and memories. They were not bad thoughts, nor ugly memories, but they made it harder to focus his attention.

He had trained three full years for this; it was not impossible, only hard. Sightless, he stared at where the fire had once been and stretched his mind past the boundaries of the settlement to the shores of the gods’ island and then out across the treacherous water of the straits towards the mainland and the wall of iron and sweat and pained horses and bored, frightened, hopeful, angry, determined men who slept in tents in the mountains of the far shore.

Urgency gave him a confidence he had once lacked. In the early days of his blindness, three years before, Bellos had prayed to every god he knew that he might be allowed to see again. Lying or walking or, once, running high-legged to avoid another fall, under the ministrations of Luain mac Calma, Elder of all Mona, Bellos had believed that he would be healed. Mac Calma’s skills had been legendary and the blow to the head that had stolen Bellos’ sight had not been hard, barely enough to cause a headache; there had seemed little reason to fear that the light might be banished from his life for ever

It was only later, looking back, that he could trace the moment when the taste of the infusions he had been given to drink had become less bitter and the stories mac Calma had sung over the fire had changed from tales of golden-haired Belgic youths riding to victory over their foes to ones of the blind dreamers of the ancestors who had suffered hardship for years in order to learn how to walk in the other-worlds and had thereby saved their people from destruction.

Then, in the days of the ancestors, children of great talent had been chosen young and shown all the wonders of all the worlds and then blinded by hot irons that the sealing of sight in this, the smallest of the worlds, might open them more fully to the visions of all the others.

Luain mac Calma, Bellos came to understand, would never deliberately blind anyone in his charge, however gifted in the dreaming, but if a youth came to him who had lost his sight by accident, and if he suspected that youth might be possessed of a talent that stretched far beyond anything yet explored, then he considered it his duty as Elder and a healer to test that youth’s limits.

Even that much had been said slowly, by careful degrees. The turning point had come on a day in the spring, nearly a year after Bellos’ blindness had first struck. He had been sitting outside the small hut with the stream running at his feet and a fire somewhere behind when he felt the tall, lean Elder come to stand by the first stepping stone that crossed the brook. Mac Calma’s dream was the heron and it was easier to think of him as such. In the empty dark of his mind Bellos pictured the angled legs and the stabbing beak and shielded himself against its probing. The Elder turned and walked away, his feet soft on spring turf and the cast leaves of winter. From some distance back, he said, “Where am I?”

He had asked the same thing the past three days in a row, from almost the same spot.

“By the curve in the stream,” Bellos said, wearily, and then, because it was his task for that month to paint clear images in his mind of all the things he could not see, he filled in all that he could imagine of the stream and the canopy of oak and hazel and drooping willow with the furled spring leaves and the first hints of catkins.

He placed the rocks of the crossing place with the moss damp and fresh and the swirling water around and a chaffinch, because it seemed right to him, and then was surprised when his mind filled in the detail of mac Calma as a man, long and lean, standing with one foot up, holding an unsheathed sword in his left hand. In his mind, the Elder tilted his head to one side and raised a brow.

Piqued, Bellos said, “You have your right foot on the first stepping stone and you carry a blade that was not made for you.”

“Really? Who was it made for?”

The thread of doubt in the Elder’s voice stung Bellos to answer. “Valerius made it for the sake of the making. He had no-one in mind to wield it, but then you came to his forge in Hibernia while he was hammering it with news that his sister was dead and it carries the fears and angers of that day.”

“How do you know that?”

“I heard you tap the iron with your finger. How else?”

“If you can tell me the means by which you can hear by the tap of a finger what the smith felt when he made a blade, I will be most interested to learn of it.”

The voice was closer, suddenly. Something shifted in the air, a hush of a foot on stone and a hand moving away from its resting place. In the dark world of Bellos’ blindness, the heron was now, vividly, a man, so that each of the lines of the Elder’s face was clear. This close, it was hard to doubt that mac Calma had sired Valerius; there was too much that was the same in them.

Hurt, Bellos backed away. He felt his eyes prickle and the skin of his throat flush hot. “I’m not a seer. If the future were open to me, do you think I would have taken a path that led to blindness? I can’t be what you want of me. Why can we not just let it go? Even if I were Roman, you would not torture me like this.”

“Is it torture, Bellos, truly?” Mac Calma had followed him. Cool, calloused hands held each side of his face, turning it until the tracking tears, which he might have hidden, were exposed. “Are you in pain still?”

Six months of silence broke apart without warning. Weeping openly, Bellos sank to sit on the stone. “Does pain have to be of the body to be real? I want to see again, to see the ocean and the trees and the great-house, even now that it’s empty and a travesty of what it once was. I want to see the sun set and the moon rise and the storm clouds cover the stars. I want to see the small things: the scratch on the side of the beaker I drink from in the morning, the wren that feeds from my hand, a leaf fall from a tree on a day without wind. I want to see a hound at a distance and know its colour, to see the look in a horse’s eye and know if Valerius trained it and, if so, whether it is safe to ride; I want to see the first look of a lamb when it stands after birthing. I feel as if someone has wrapped a bandage round my eyes as a bad joke and I want them to take it off. I want you to take it off.”

Bellos was in blackness again, and thought mac Calma had left him. He sat on the stone and turned his face into the wind and heard nothing, and wondered if he had gone deaf, too, which would have been the end of living. He jumped as lean fingers settled on his shoulder and mac Calma’s voice, stripped of all taunting said, “Bellos, I’m so sorry. In all the planning, I forget what it is to be young and powerless and in pain…”

The fingers moved down Bellos’ arm, firm healer’s hands that knew what they were about. Unresisting, he let his right hand be smoothed out flat and felt the hilt of the sword that had been forged by Valerius press into his palm. Confused, he gripped it, feeling foolish for his lack of warrior’s skill. Even so, the familiarity of it coursed through him, bright as a Hibernian morning.

He had never held that blade before, but he knew without effort its balance and weight and the ridges on the grip. As if they were his own, he could feel the fear and pain and anger that had coursed through Valerius as he had beaten the last part of it to shape on his anvil.

The anger took hold of him, matching his own pain and sending it on to its natural conclusion. Before he could arrest the thought, Bellos saw himself dead, in the Roman way, fallen forward onto the blade so that the length of it entered his chest in the front and came out again, wet, at the back.

Shocked, he dropped the thing and heard iron bite into turf. Imagined blood splashed out in rivers across the green grass and he could not make it disappear. He looked up and saw a heron take flight and yet knew that in the world of his blindness, mac Calma had not moved.

Something split apart in Bellos’ head and he saw the heron circle in over the stream and felt mac Calma’s half-smile and watched his own ghost greet Briga, who ruled death, and take the first steps to the lands beyond life before it faded into a future that would never happen.

He would not let it happen. If his first prophecy were proved false, it would be his last; no-one asks for visions from a failed seer. Bellos sat on the ground and breathed slowly and the knifing pain behind his temples became less. He said, “I am not going to fall on that blade, now or ever. Whatever is happening is not the future. I really don’t want to be a seer.”

“Which is fortunate because you would need to train for twenty years to come close, and even then it is not always easy to interpret which dreams show futures that may happen only if every condition is met and which are certain.”

“Are there any of those?”

“Very few, in my experience. And there are more that are purely born of unspoken anxieties. Your vision of yourself dying was a fear, not a future. The two are quite different.”

Mac Calma bent to pick up the blade. Bellos could feel its shine, not as simply the moving of air, but as a raw, gut-felt awareness that let him feel the essence of the blade and the man who had made it overlaid with the heron-soul of the Elder who held it out across his palms.

Mac Calma said, “The blind dreamers of the ancestors rarely chose to become seers. Their skills were better used in other ways. As yours will be.”

“What other ways?”

They were facing each other now, with the stream alongside. The water chuckled and mumbled over smooth stones. The shapes of it made sculptures that formed and melted in Bellos’ mind in a way that was quite different from his mind-made imaginings, as if a door had opened and the land beyond it were not clouded in blindness. He clasped his hands about his knees. “I don’t understand how seeing fear and anger could be useful.”

“Do you not? It will not only be fear or anger you can see, but all strong feeling. Even so, suppose an enemy army were to come to battle and you were to know the hopes and fears of the men who fought in it. Could you see how that might benefit our warriors? Or our dreamers? It is not a simple thing to send dreams into clouded minds. Easier to pick up the threads of those fears that already exist and weave them into something stronger. Men who fight afraid, die afraid. If we face overwhelming numbers, making more of their fears may be our best—our only—hope.”

There had been no army of legionaries camped at the straits then. War on Mona had seemed impossible; Rome had been a distant threat, with the legions enmired in an endless, apparently unwinnable battle against the tribes of western Britannia. In his naiveté, Bellos had said, “The warriors of Mona number in the thousands. The dreamers are twice that number and twice as dangerous. How could any army outnumber us when they must cross the straits by boat, ten at a time, or try to swim it in columns, towed by their horses?”

A certain closing had happened in the worlds that had just opened. Sitting by the stream with his senses scraped clean, Bellos had experienced, also for the first time, what it was to have a mind shielded against his new way of seeing.

From the strange flatness that had come suddenly to obscure him, mac Calma had said, quite kindly, “We must lure the legions to the west if Breaca is to have a chance to free the east. To do that, we may have to sacrifice Mona.”

“How?”

“You will see, if it happens. I will not destroy lives for the sake of it; as many as may be of those who live here will be sent west to Hibernia. Already we have the ships waiting.”

“But then Mona will be undefended.”

“Not entirely. We will not leave it empty and the gods have ways to protect their own, but even so it seems likely that there will be an assault by at least one legion, maybe two, on this island. When that day comes, we will need you as we have never needed one man before. If it would help us to destroy all that is Roman and push it from the land, would you learn what I can teach you of the ways to walk between the worlds?”

The day had fallen quiet. The skip of the stream and the chatter of children at the great-house and the sighing wind had all been hushed. Only the wren that fed daily from Bellos’ hand sang clearly. The dreamers told that the wren was mightiest of the birds, beloved of the gods because it alone could fly higher than the eagle, and see farther. With nothing to obscure the purity of the sound, the spiralling notes stippled the sky, beautiful as leaves that fall without wind in autumn.

Bellos had said, “If you think I can do it, I will do my best. I make no promises of success.”

The heron that was mac Calma had been more than usually gentle as he said, “The gods never ask for the promise of success, only that we try.”

For three years, Bellos had tried his best to learn all that mac Calma could teach him.

With each successive year, he had watched the sacrifice of Mona brought closer with a ruthless single-mindedness that had shocked him more deeply at every step.

Valerius had played a part in it, leading the warriors to battle to allow the evacuation across the short sea to Hibernia of dreamers and children, livestock, breeding herds of horses and all that was sacred and could be moved.

The great-house could not be moved. The ancestors had built it to withstand storm and tempest and the tests of the dreamers, but the vast beams of its walls and the turf on the roof, which were old when the gods were young, were as much a part of Mona as the rocks of the foreshore and the forests of the interior; they could not be uprooted and shipped west to Hibernia, however welcome they might have been.

With its long lineage of dreaming, with the carvings along the roof beams showing the dream of each Elder going back hundreds of generations, the great-house of Mona was the most profound of mac Calma’s sacrifices, designed to draw the Roman governor to attack the island, and thus to commit his forces to a battle they could not win against an enemy who had already fled the field.

The plan had succeeded in proportion to the cost. With horrified admiration, Bellos had watched as a pacifist Roman governor had been slain and his successor, picked for his skills as a general, had been goaded into a progressively more savage war against the Silures and the Ordovices. These two tribes had successfully held the west for the twenty years since the invasion. Under mac Calma’s guidance, they had gradually, and apparently unwillingly, been pushed into retreat, luring the legions westward by slow degrees as summer closed into autumn and the fighting season drew to an end.

Feeling victory close, the Roman governor had advanced hard at the onset of spring until he camped with two full legions and eight wings of cavalry in the mainland valleys less than half a day’s ride from the vicious currents of the straits that guarded Mona. So large an army, to capture and subdue a scrap of an island that a warrior on a fit horse could ride round in a day.

The legions were afraid of Mona, and of the men and women who lived there under the gods’ care. That much was obvious to anyone, whatever their vision and training. It was to learn the shape and size and texture of those fears that Bellos sat beside the cold fire and sent his mind beyond the confines of his body as he had been taught.

It was becoming easier with practice. The hardest part, always, was crossing the short stretch of sea that divided the mainland from the island. In the world of sight that other men inhabited, the gods’ water flowed grey and wild and unpredictable, with shifting sandbars and hidden currents to drag into drowning all those who sought to conquer Mona. In the worlds through which Bellos the Blind alone could travel, the sea was a chasm of untold depth that sucked souls into the void of its heart and destroyed them.

Less than two days before, he had finally found a way across. Something mac Calma had said gave him the key. Remember that this world is an illusion as much as the others. We who have sight see what we choose to see and so make it real.

Understanding the truth of that made it possible for Bellos to view the chasm at least partly as a product of his own fear. For nine days, he had worked on focusing his will until he could make himself believe it nothing more than an illusion. On the same sharp spring morning when geese mourned a dead messenger in the lands of the Eceni, Bellos the Blind, sitting in the great-house on Mona half a month’s ride to the west, and passing through a world in which he alone could see, crossed the gods’ chasm as if it were dry rock and, for the first time in his life, stretched his mind to touch the mainland of Britannia.

His quiet satisfaction as he saw the rocks and seaweeds of the shore lasted less than a heartbeat. Even as he paused to look around, he was enveloped by a wall of blinding fog, product of the wine and fatigue and ill-considered dreams of the legionaries.

Bellos had become used to being able to see in the other-worlds. Suddenly blind, he stumbled across unseen boulders with his arms outstretched, feeling too close to the days of his youth as a whore in a harbour tavern in Gaul when Manannan of the waves had sent the sea haar to fill the town and made everyone white-blind.

Panic made him careless. He felt himself trip and began to fall forward as if his body had real weight and might be cut to ribbons on the sharp rocks of the shore. Mac Calma’s voice held him:…an illusion as much as the others…

An illusion. Only that. Bellos breathed deep and made the rocks less sharp and gave himself the kind of balance Valerius had in battle. Steadier, he closed his mind to everything but the earth at his feet and made himself stand still on flat ground of his own making. The fogs of his childhood had been harsh and wet and cold and had mirrored his life of the time, which was not his life of today. The understanding of these two things, and the difference between them, made his fear less. He laid aside past memories and remembered instead the warmth of the great-house in winter when the fires were fully lit and the care that surrounded him now.

Thus enfolded, Bellos stretched his mind again towards the palpable textures of a thousand men’s nightmares, and was not blinded.

He breathed in the hopes and fears of the legions. His head buzzed with the myths and rumours of defeated men who had fought too long in a land where they were not welcome. He listened to old conversations, recalled by sleepy minds, which laid the hell of the weather and the sucking insects and the bad food and the bogs and the quicksands and the routine mutilation of slain legionaries all at the feet of gods who supported the tribes and loathed the legions.

None of it was specific. None of it was enough to halt an invasion.

Bellos took in a breath and set about to find what he needed. First, he created clarity, hand’s breadth by hand’s breadth across the ground in front of him. His hands spun the fear-fog into cords that could be teased gently from their moorings without alerting those from whom they came. The men thus robbed would wake in the morning with thicker heads than their wine might have predicted, but, more important, the full colour and terror of their nightmares came to Bellos as he wove, so that he came gradually to see the common threads that ran through all of them.

He was working near the centre where the officers’ pavilions were pitched, when he found the pinpoint of light that showed a wiser mind. He watched it sideways for a while, never looking directly in case his gaze was felt. From this one man, he took no threads of thought, only skirted him and left the thinning mist of his comrades as a cloak. Even so, there was a reaching out from the other and a kind of recognition, as if they shared more in common than they knew.

Surprise and a trace of his own fear loosened Bellos’ hold on the place where he stood. A ripple of cold spread across his chest in warning; in the great-house, he was no longer alone.

Holding fast to the cords he had spun, he made the easier, lighter crossing back to the world of his heart and daily life and opened his eyes into blindness and the draught of a lit fire.

“Luain mac Calma.” Some men he knew simply by the way the air changed around them. He said, “I thought you were on Hibernia overseeing the building of a new great-house to shelter those who have been evacuated from here.”

The Elder was sitting by the fire pit. The smell of new smoke came from between his feet. He said, “I was. The great-house is done, or nearly so. They have less need of me than you do.”

“You think I have need of you?” Bellos felt himself stiffen. “Have I risked more danger than I knew? Or failed in the tasks you set me?”

“I don’t know. Have you?”

Bellos was learning how thoroughly mac Calma cloaked himself. In this man, alone of all the warriors and dreamers he had searched in his training, Bellos could see nothing that he was not shown. He saw humour now, and the archness of the heron, and watched, surprised, as both softened to something warmer.

“I’m sorry. That was disingenuous, and also dishonest. I have a need to be here that is separate from what you do.” The Elder rose and moved away from the fire. He sounded more like Valerius than he usually did. He said, “For twenty years since the legions came, I have watched the tribes driven into servitude in spite of all that I and others can do. This may not be our last chance, but it is our best. If we can draw Suetonius Paulinus and his two legions fully to us, and destroy them—even if we can only weaken them—then Breaca and Valerius may prevail in the east. If they can take Camulodunum and restore the god to his seat, then we may finish what we have begun; we may wake one day in a land free of Rome. The whole of that action begins here, now, on Mona.”

The cold that had touched him before sat again in Bellos’ chest. He said, “You haven’t answered my question. Am I failing in my part of this?”

“Not at all. But I may be. I have risked the sacrifice of Mona and all that is precious here. A hundred generations of Elders have learned in this great-house and I will see it burn to preserve those things I believe are greater. I may be wrong. This may be the greatest hubris and the biggest mistake ever made by one man in the face of the gods. Only by being here as it happens will I know which it is.”

In the fire-warmed quiet that followed, Bellos saw something of how the Elder of Mona might look if he chose not to shield himself to one who walked between the worlds. He said, “The legions are terrified of the straits. They believe them filled with sea-serpents and spirit-women who will lure them in by song and drown them. They fear the threat of warriors who kill from the forest and the high lands and do not stand in lines and fight. More than all of that, they fear the dreamers; their commanders have told them that we sacrifice living men to the fire and read the future in their screaming. They have all seen the circus in Rome and been rendered weak in their guts for fear to see the same deaths enacted on the men of the legions. If we can bring any of these things to reality, they will come to us already beaten.”

“Or they will fight with the carelessness of men who know their lives forfeit and want only the clean death of battle. I have seen that, and not only in the legions; when the fear is greatest, sometimes it turns to battle rage and is all the harder to contain. But it’s good to know what they fear. We can work with it. Thank you.” Mac Calma tapped the tips of his fingers on Bellos’ knee, as he had done once or twice in the days of their training. “I have an idea of how hard that must have been. We may need you again. Will you be willing to do it?”

“It was effortless,” said Bellos, and believed himself. “If it will defeat Rome, I will do it whenever and for as long as you ask.”

“But not tonight; you need to sleep. Thorn has lit a fire in your hut. She may still be there if you go.”

Thorn was there. Like mac Calma, she made no allowance for Bellos’ blindness, for which he was daily grateful. She was warm and giving and glad to see him, and that, too, left him speechless with wonder and gratitude.

He had been a child whore in Gaul, used by men, not kindly, and beaten after by the tavernmaster if he baulked at their advances. He had resolved early in life never to inflict the pain of his desire on another human being. Then Valerius had come, with his guarded, over-careful kindness and the brittle touchiness born of need to show always that he was never going to ask anything unwanted of the child he had freed.

Bellos had not expected ever to feel rejected by a man, or to care if he were. The hurt of that, too, had taken some time to heal and it was only latterly, as he had come to understand the pain that drove Valerius, that he had begun to comprehend the fastidious care with which he had been treated. He had started to love then, and to yearn in his own right, and had needed time to set that aside before something approaching true friendship could grow. It had done; he believed that and kept the memories of it fresh in his heart.

Thorn had come to tend him after Valerius left for the east. She, too, had been careful in her affection, becoming a part of his life as surely as the wren that fed from his hand, never asking for more. He had been slow to understand her, too, and so the moves towards something deeper had been all hers, taken so slowly and carefully that she had been in his bed, winding her body around his, before he had truly understood what had overtaken him, and that it was allowed, and safe, and would not cause hurt to either of them, and that she wanted it of him and that he wanted it more than anything he had ever imagined, or could imagine, except possibly the return of his sight.

When mac Calma had returned sight of a kind, Bellos’ one fear was that he might lose the want of Thorn. In the event, his need had been no less and his joy greater. He could envisage no greater gift than the greeting she gave when he returned, cold and worn, from the great-house and she was waiting for him with a fire lit and her hands chafing his to warm them and the smell of stewed hare in the pot and her voice weaving a magic that brought him back to this world, where he might be blind, but he could reach for her and hold her close and explore the contours of her being with the same wonder as the first day and each day since.

He put the bowls aside, carefully, not to spill what might be left. Thorn came to him, teasingly delicate. She smelled of the sea and of wood gathered from a forest floor and of the pepper-musk that flavoured every part of her. Her skin was smooth as polished stone and her hair spun wool under his fingers. He had no idea what colour it was.

He let her draw him to the pile of horse hides that was their bed and cradle him in her arms as if he were a child. Her breasts pressed on his back and her sex and the feel of both brought him back so that he understood how far into the other-worlds he had gone. He might have been afraid of that, but the urgency of his own need pushed the thought away so that he rolled over and took her face in his hands and kissed it, and waited until her breathing told him that her need was as great as his before he entered her.

Later, as her hound warmed his back and she warmed all that was still warm in him, he said, “I thought you had gone to Hibernia with the rest of the dreamers?”

“I had.” Thorn smiled into the crook of his neck. “I came back. Mac Calma’s dreams showed me here when the legions come.”

Bellos felt the cold in his chest for the third time that night. His fingers halted their combing of her hair. “Do his dreams show you still living when they leave?” he asked.

She bit the edge of his collarbone, reproving. “The dreams don’t yet show anything after the first battle. We have to make the future happen as we want it. That’s why I’m here.”