CHAPTER 35

In the land of the Cornovii, only Ardacos could travel safely.

The pathmakers of the Brigantes were fast and silent and left no trail but they did not see the scout who watched from a hillside. Ardacos saw him and found him and killed him and returned with a Cornovi knife, with a deer’s foot hilt, as proof. Breaca thanked the pathmakers and sent them back to Venutios.

Soon after that, Ardacos left his horse on open land where it could be found by others and went on foot, ranging from side to side on the rolling heath and into the open weave of the forest, leaving marks that only Cygfa could find. Breaca followed her lead, as safe or as dangerous as it might be; she could do nothing else, nor speed their travel. Miraculously, surprisingly, she felt herself free of all responsibility for the first time since she had come east from Mona to the lands of the Eceni.

It was an illusion, but she accepted the gift of its freedom and chose not to think deeply on what they were nearing, or the failed quest behind, or the question that Venutios had offered as an unexpected, unwanted gift. With Cygfa ahead and Stone at her heel, she rode fast on small paths, or no paths at all, heading south and a little west. The gritstone and heather moors of the meeting place became high limestone crags and deep clefted valleys with forest eaten at the edges by the axes of the legions, but not yet reduced all to farmland.

Near evening, under a clear sky with the sun vastly red on the horizon, they saw Ardacos for the first time since he had abandoned his horse. He sat on a fallen birch, eating flowers of cow parsley and elder, so that his lips were dusted in yellow and his thighs streaked where he had wiped his fingers clean on them. He had taken the time to braid his hair and weave in the eye teeth of the bear that were his right. His face was painted with white clay and his eyes were no longer haunted. There were three deer-handled knives newly hanging from his belt.

Breaca said, “You have met with the bear.”

“I have. And she is content.” There was a life in his eyes she had not seen for years; he, too, was revelling in the gift of a day’s freedom, whatever may come at the end of it. He met her gaze and held it and said the things without speaking that she needed most to hear.

Breaking off, he nodded over his shoulder to the forest, where the undergrowth grew to chest height and seemed impassable. “From here, we need to leave the horses.” He looked up the length of her, from feet to head. “Are you fit to run?”

It was a challenge of the kind they had set each other on Mona, long before, when the world was young. She lifted one shoulder and said, “I don’t know. Shall we find out?”

She could run, which was good to know, and exhilarating for a while before it became simply hard work.

The challenge was greater than they had ever set on Mona. Then they had not been flogged, had not walked the grey lands between life and death, had not lost—and so refound—the reasons for living. Only once on Mona had they had to run and fight and hide with death all around from undiscovered sources.

It was not all running: Breaca crawled along paths through dense brush that opened only barely and closed behind them; she crossed rivers on stepping stones screened by drooping hazel and river alder so that they were invisible until she trod on them; she sheltered under a whitethorn bush for the duration of a storm and then ran on. Long into dusk, she scrambled up a narrow path by feel alone and sat for a moment at the top of the limestone crag clutching the bent rowan that had anchored her with one hand and Stone with the other and thought that, if she was not as fit as in her youth on Mona, she was no worse than she had been before the procurator’s flogging, and perhaps a little fitter.

Soon after that, they saw the fires in the wooded valley down and to their right.

“Wait here.” Ardacos laid a hand on her arm. Breaca sat and watched him slide alone into the dusk.

Cygfa did not wait. She vanished and returned as a ghosted shape in the dusk; only her hair was visible, and the silvered whites of her eyes. “Graine’s there, in the valley. There’s a circle of Cornovii dancing. She’s part of it.”

“And the others?”

“They’re all there, and more than a hundred Cornovii, all dancing. Hawk is in the centre, wearing a stag skull with antlers. There’s a woman with him. I think it may be Gunovar.”

From somewhere to the right, Ardacos said, “It is.” He pushed through branches that drenched him with old rain and came close enough to let her read him in the dusk. He loved Gunovar, as he had once loved Breaca. The weight of that carved new lines in his face.

To him, Breaca said, “If we attack a hundred Cornovii, we’ll die and they may kill the others. To live, we need to reach the elders alive. If we walk in openly, do you think the scouts will kill us before they recognize who we are?”

“They know already.” She saw the tilt of his face in the part-light as he looked down at his hands. “It is only because of who you are that we have been allowed to come this far. If they did not have orders to guide us to their elders, we would have been sent away long since.” The admission hurt; he was once the best there had ever been. He raised his voice so that the words carried to the sighing trees. “I know of six who watch us, and have done so since we entered the woods. Another two I am less certain of.”

It was not impossible, only unexpected; Breaca had never yet felt unsafe in Ardacos’ care. She said, “If they knew you were there, why did they let you kill three of their scouts?”

The sun-lines deepened about his eyes. “The ones who died were not good enough. The men of the deer, like the followers of the bear, test their young thus against worthy opponents. I am…not unworthy. Those deaths will not be held against us.”

“But they didn’t kill you when they knew you were there. They, too, are not unworthy. Does the same not apply?”

He grinned, a youth again, who has won a challenge. “They didn’t know where I was, except when I was with you, and you are the Boudica who is guarded now by more than Briga and the grandmothers. You make your own rules, or the gods make them for you.”

“How do they know that?”

He shook his head at the stupidity of the question. “Breaca, it shines from you. It has always done, just less so when you were ill. The elders of the Horned One are not so different from the elders of the she-bear. They will see it as we would. If you would stand now, and address those who are hidden, we can test if I am right.”

They danced for the horned god under pine made heavy by rain, to skull-drummed rhythms and pipe music and low urgent chants that the god had given to the ancestors and had never been changed.

The skull-beat was a heartbeat, calm sometimes, sometimes hunted, sometimes—and Graine shut herself away at these times—fired by the rut and the power of the god in the stag battles and the mating afterwards that was the right of the victor.

Those times apart, she danced through the sweat and the smoke and the weaving net of noise because she could do nothing else; the songs sang into her blood, the skull drums pulsed into the marrow of her bones, the whistling pipes drew her soul forward so that her flesh had to follow.

She danced in a ring of Cornovii. They were not all men but all of them except her were old enough to have had children and all the women showed the linear marks of childbirth on their bellies. They were all unclothed and no-one tried to protect her from the sight of it and she found that she no longer cared.

With Dubornos in front of her, animated as she had never known him, she danced time and again through the cycle of life that was most sacred the Cornovii; through the growth of the small thing seeded by the stag in the belly of the hind and the quick slither of its birthing and its first steps in a world where the Horned One held the new life sacred.

With Efnís wild-eyed and leaping behind, she danced over and over the enfolding breath of the mother and the calf’s first knowing of cold, first fear, first taste of milk and of green things growing and of bark in the winter when the snow hid the ground.

With Bellos close to her side, surefooted as any mountain hind, she danced and became the deer and lived and almost-died free of humanity’s care and so began to touch the edges of understanding what that might mean.

She was one of hundreds and they all danced in a ring about the horned man in the centre, who was Hawk and not-Hawk, and the woman who was more than Gunovar who met him and painted her face with his blood.

They danced and the rain dried on the grass and the stars spun and made new shapes and every one of them was carried by the magic of the drums and the horn pipes and they were no longer Eceni and Cornovii and a single Coritani, for ever at war, but one pulse, one heartbeat, one breath, one dance through life towards the inevitable death and there was not one of them who would not willingly have stepped over the precipice that their dancing made to fall into the arms of the waiting god when he called them.

Each time they came close and backed away and started the cycle again with the rut and the setting of seed, they felt envy that the one in the centre was the chosen; that his seed would remain to make new life and he would fly to the god in the moment of his perfection, and be honoured for it ever after.

Graine stubbed her toe. It was a small thing, and only came about because she was by far the youngest and the smallest of the dancers. She was a hind, or perhaps a young buck, and the hunt began and she was trying to out-leap the hounds, which meant leaping higher than Efnís and Dubornos, and she came down awkwardly and twisted her big toe and it hurt so that she hopped and lost the rhythm and thereby lost the dance.

She understood the power of it only by the shock when she stepped back. She did not stop dancing—to do so now would have been to risk being trampled by the rest—but the salt sweat on her lip was no longer the salt of birthing and the pounding heart in her chest was from exertion, not from the hunt, or the rut, or the closeness of death. She looked about her and saw Efnís completely given to the god and, far more surprisingly, Dubornos, dancing with his eyes half closed and rapture painted on the hills and valleys of his face such as she had never seen in him in the whole of her life. He was a man transformed, aching with the fear of the hunt and the proximity of death and yet in ecstasy of a kind his troubled heart had never given him.

She looked for Bellos and found him nearby and that was the greatest surprise of all. He leaped with the others and shook his head with the pound of the beat, but when she sought him and found him, he turned his blind face to hers and smiled, quite normally, and then blinked both his blind eyes together in such an obvious signal that she stopped dancing for a moment, and havoc and discord shivered down the line.

“Don’t stop.” He was at her side, lifting her forward so that they could continue. “Stay in yourself and watch and learn. It is not a bad thing to be given to the god, but the moon will rise soon and things will change and it is good for one given to Nemain to be able to step away from her when the need arises.”

“But you’re given to Briga.”

“And she is mother to all things. Even the horned god. Even death. And I think, if you look now between the trees, that she has sent one who will change what was to have happened here. You may not have to watch Hawk die.”

Graine stared about, confused. She was dancing and the fire was bright. Beyond it, the forest was a swirl of dark and other dark and none of it had shape more than a shadow except for the silver haze on the horizon that was the first cutting edge of the sickle moon. Bellos picked her up and whirled her high and set her on his shoulders. His hands held her tightly, buoyantly; he was as exuberant as the others, only with a different reason.

“Be my eyes for me,” he said, laughing, so that she laughed too, “and tell me that I am right and that not only is the Boudica healed, but she has found the heart-song of a blade that will carry all of us past the legions.”

Breaca heard the song of her father’s blade long before she came to it.

Because of Stone, she could not climb down the rock to the valley’s floor.

Because there was no other way down nearby, the Cornovi scouts who had become their guides led them south along the top of the cliff, towards the far southern end where the limestone dipped away to join open heathland and a hound could run safely down.

Because of that, they came to the horses, and the packs that they still carried.

Ardacos had been right: the scouts had known who Breaca was and were in awe of her; even in the dark, they were careful not to hold her gaze for long, or to look her full in the face. He had been wrong about their numbers. There were nine scouts leading them and surrounding them and following behind in case they should lose the path; the eight that he had known of, and one he had not. The shame of that one left unseen hung about him the full length of the silent, leaping run along the crag’s head, past the fire and the dancing and the rattled drumbeats and mourning pipes that reached up from the valley’s floor and snared them, almost, in the net of their rhythms.

They were not moving slowly; the scouts could run through dense forest at night as easily as in daytime and they were good guides; those who followed them were not much slower. Even so, the stars had moved a long way across the sky before they came to the crag’s end, so that Breaca had begun to wonder if she should have tethered Stone and gone back for him in the morning. Then they found the path and ran down it to the valley’s floor and a horse that she recognized whinnied in the dark and it was not, after all, a waste of time running to the end of the valley.

“That’s Graine’s mare,” she said.

It was, and with it were Dubornos’ moon-grey and Gunovar’s draught horse and Hawk’s odd-eyed chestnut. The light from the fires stretched just so far and no more, enough to show that their travelling packs were untouched, and the weapons wrapped in oiled skin and bound to the back of the saddle.

Her father’s blade was there, strapped to the back of Hawk’s horse, that had been sent to Mona for safe keeping, at Eburovic’s command. She felt it as a tangible presence, as if her great-great-grandfather had made it newly and lifted it from the fires and placed it in her hand, still smelling of burned iron and his sweat. She felt the roughness of his face as he kissed her, and his hands on her shoulders and his voice, speaking, but not the words that he said. He was her father, and not her father, a different part of her lineage.

The blade sang to her, as it had not done in the silent dell by the gods’ pool with Valerius watching over her as if she might break, and her son setting fire to the first Roman watchtower in the first attack of a war. Or perhaps it had sung just the same and she had not been able to hear it then.

The horses were hobbled by a fast-running stream. Under the watch of the Cornovi scouts, she spoke to them, and briefly to the horse-boys on guard, and the blade was hers; wrapped tight and singing. Her palm burned as it had when it was newly cut. She could have wept for the feel of it returning, when she had thought it gone beyond recall.

She knelt and laid the blade on the stones and heather by the stream. Stars gave her light. The Hunter had passed over, but the Hound remained, reflected in the running water, and the twinned Serpents that followed behind it. She sought, and found, the ties with which Hawk had bound it safe.

“Not yet. Don’t unwrap it here.” Ardacos was a shadow seen in the silver of the stream. He spoke softly, so that the sound was lost in the rushing water. “If you need to use it to fight your way out, we are lost anyway, but I think it will count for more if it is unwrapped by the fire in front of the elders under the light of the horned moon.” He came close enough to touch. “It can sing to you wrapped as well as unwrapped.”

She had always trusted his common sense. “Thank you.” She squeezed his arm. “There was no shame in missing the ninth scout.”

“I should have died for it.” His voice was less bitter than she had feared. “But for this night, I am glad I did not. Just to hear the music they make was worth living a night longer.” He tipped his head down the valley, whence the fire made the trees glow red and the music of the deer-men skittered through the branches. “Do the skull drums of the she-bear sear the soul so strongly?”

“Far worse. But you have never yet sent a man unwilling to his death. For that you can drum any kind of discord. We will have to move fast now if we are to reach the dancers before the moon rises. The bear is not a friend to the deer. Will you be safe if we go back to the fire?”

“As safe as anyone. And I’m not going to stay away.”

Cygfa was there, concerned. “The scouts say the moon is rising. If we want to reach the dancers before the rite’s end, we will have to ride. They say if we are not afraid to risk our necks in the dark, there’s a path that night bring us to the fire alive.”

Her mother rode Hawk’s horse, and Stone was with her.

Breaca came from between the trees and stopped for a moment where the trees stopped, so they stood as honour guards on either side, and the fire made liquid bronze of her hair and turned Hawk’s red horse to heaving, sweating gold.

She was changed, different, cast in new colours. Graine saw all of those in the first vertiginous moments when it was all she could do to hold on to Bellos and not fall from his shoulders in the whirling madness of the dance and looking out to the trees was one thing too many.

Graine saw her mother and the horse and the hound and something lit all three from within that was greater than the fire and it was not anything she had seen before. Whether it was a healing was another question.

She could not hear the song of any blade, which was a good thing.

Holding tight to Bellos’ wrists to keep from falling, she spoke to his upturned face and the quantity of questions it held. “I have never seen the wildfire in my mother. Is this it?”

“I don’t know.” He was still joyful. “But it’s far more than I was led to expect. What of the bladesong?”

“I don’t know. I can’t hear it. I think it may be my grandfather’s blade. Valerius gave it to Hawk. It’s still on his horse.”

Iron clashed on iron in her head as she spoke. Not understanding, she said, “The dance must have opened you to more than is your right. That song is not for others to hear.”

Bellos’ face was open and wise. He had dreamed on Mona and was given to Briga. He sang as he swung her. “Tonight, child of the moon, everything is for everyone to hear.”

He had dreamed on Mona and was given to Briga and she was a child and not yet fully healed. Still, she did not believe him.

The trees parted again. Cygfa came through, and then Ardacos, on Breca’s other side. Others saw them, and the dancing faltered, and then the singing and the pipes and one of the drums. Its twin kept up an erratic solo for a dozen beats, and then it, too, failed.

Hawk continued to leap and spin in the circle’s centre; the god filled him and he could not stop. Gunovar matched him, so that he might not be left alone. The rest of the dancers, Cornovi and Eceni, came, sweating, to a standstill.

Bellos said, “You should go down now.”

Graine came unsteadily to the ground, holding on to Bellos’ forearms and then his shoulders and then his waist. She hugged him as her feet reached the earth and felt the soft whisper of his lips as he stooped to kiss her head. About her, men and women were returning slowly to their senses. Not all of them wished to. Efnís shook his head and bent double with his hands propped on his knees, catching his breath. “Too…soon,” he said. “It should not…have ended yet.” He did not have breath to elaborate, but he was not a broken man, only concerned.

Dubornos was broken. He stood near Graine, staring east to where the first hard edge of the moon sliced up over the crag’s head. The light of the fire did not touch him at all. He was bone white with his eyes black in his face and a black weight of grief about him that cast his decades of melancholy into shade by comparison.

For no better reason than that she was closest, and she cared for him, Graine slid her hand in his. He flinched and made to step away and then came back to himself and let her small hand hold him, and feel the shaking and the hollowness in his soul and the tunnel that led from it to the god, that was closing.

He looked down at her and tried to smile and failed. With raw shock, she saw the tears leak to join the sweat on his cheeks. “It’s over,” he said, and his voice had lost all hope. “We were so close, and your mother has broken it.”

Graine let her hand drop away and did not try to comfort him further. Never in her life had she heard so much grief from any man.

She turned towards her mother and did not know what she could do, only that what had been shattered must be made whole, and only the Boudica, who had done the breaking, could mend it.