CHAPTER 41

For the first time in Breaca’s life, the torc of the Eceni ancestors settled easily about her neck. The ancestor-dreamer did not hiss warnings of hubris from the cave of her mind; the Sun Hound did not burden her with foretellings of doom if she let his line or hers fall into ruin; the weight of ceremony of a hundred generations did not settle on her, demanding that she be their equal.

The end-burnings of the fire that had once been a friend glowed red in the dark and she sat with it, the only one awake in a host of thousands and tens of thousands on the almost-morning of battle. The torc lay warm as a living snake against her skin, but there was no threat in it. She felt its presence as she felt Valerius’ hound, a thing that hovered on the edge of understanding but nevertheless gave comfort and a measure of protection.

“The hound is his dream.” The voice came from behind her, rich with the currents of sleep. “The serpent-spear is yours. Each of you carries that which you need most to hold it close.”

“I thought you were asleep?”

“I was.” Airmid sat up and eased round beside her. “Efnís is leaving at dawn. He’ll take word back to Luain mac Calma of what we plan. I should speak to him before he leaves, but not yet. There’s time enough before the light comes.”

Time enough to be together. They leaned against each other in the dark, shoulder to shoulder, warmth to warmth, breath to breath. They had never said goodbye on the morning before battle, only their closeness was more tangible, and time was slowed for a while, then too fast.

It was still slow now, near dawn, as if the pulse of the earth yet slept.

They sat quietly, healed and healer, and watched the fire. Presently, Breaca took off the torc and balanced it on the joined tent of their knees. “When you gave me this after ’Tagos’ death, I felt it as a living thing, the serpent of the serpent-spear, filled with the power of the ancestor-dreamer.”

“And now?” Airmid’s head was on her shoulder, a heavy, necessary weight. Impossible to imagine it gone, or that other mornings might not see them joined like this.

“Now it feels empty. Not dead, simply empty, like a vessel that has been drained, and is waiting to be filled again.”

“It is,” Airmid said. “All that was in it is in you. Can you feel that?”

“Yes.”

Breaca turned the torc between her hands. The workmanship still left her breathless. The ancestors, having more time, had learned to work gold in ways smiths working under Rome could never do. In its simplicity was its beauty, in the unsullied purity of the red Siluran gold and the weaving of the wires and the open loops at the end for the kill-feathers. There were no feathers on it now, nor had been, since the first year of the legions’ invasion.

Airmid ran her fingers along, bridging the gap with her fingers. “If you’re going to wear it in battle again, there should be something here, for who you are. Wait…” and she reached for her own pack and brought out a feather cast in silver, one-third the size of a real crow’s feather, battered, with one end bent.

Breaca said, “I thought the procurator’s men stole all of those.”

“So did I.” Airmid held it out flat on her palm, so that the fire could make it gold. She had red thread with her and began to bind the shaft. “Gunovar found this afterwards in the ruin of ’Tagos’ hut, and gave it to me to hold until you were well again.”

“Thank you.” More than the newness of the torc, the feather was the confirmation of her wholeness.

Breaca watched Airmid’s long, fine dreamer’s fingers weave the thread to the feather and the feather to the gold. “I thought they might come, now, at the end; the elder grandmother, the ancestor-dreamer and the Sun Hound and all those who came before and since. I have sat half the night awaiting them.”

“If it were truly the end, they might do so. There is a battle first, before any endings come. Would their presence help you fight?”

“No.” The thought made her grimace. “I can live without help from past ghosts.”

“But you know something of what is needed before the fighting starts?”

“Last night, when I was watching the fire, a hare stepped down from the moon, and there were hounds that were not Stone who followed it. Graine was there. She helped.”

“Can you bring that into being?”

“I think so. Later, when we must.” She did not mention Venutios’ question, nor had she done so, to anyone.

Dew had formed on the grass around them, beyond the heat of the fire. In the trees behind, a kestrel fed mewling young. Somewhere too close for comfort, the skull drums of the she-bear started up again, maddening as biting flies. Even so, it was dark and the line of the eastern day had not yet begun.

Breaca reached out, and took the half-bound feather and the torc and laid them aside. “It’s still night,” she said, “and we have time to be together before we must be all that we have become. I think we can make better use of it than this.”

This much, at least, had not changed. They did not say goodbye, but they lay together in the dark beyond the red wash of Braint’s fire and let drop the last boundaries that divided them, and shared the stretching time when the pulse of the earth was still slow and they could watch each heartbeat, and savour it.

The hare raised its head and snuffed the air.

Graine froze in her forward movement. She lay facedown in long grass with morning mist curling round her like fire smoke and her hair sodden with dew.

She could feel the hare’s presence as a second heartbeat in her chest, and nurtured it, as she might a new flame in too-damp tinder. Warily, afraid to crush it with her own clumsiness, she attended as lightly as she could on the dry, tickling sensation that teased the roots of her mind, on the spiking sense of urgency that did not come from her, or from her mother a spear’s throw to the left, or from Stone, close by on the right, but from the hare ahead.

These four—herself, her mother, the hound and the hare—were all part of the hunt, and Graine the centre of their web. Her own heart hammered too hard and would not be quiet. She had not felt like this since before the procurator’s men had assaulted her, possibly not even then. It was as if sight had been given back to her after long months of blindness and the world held more colour than it had done before. She wanted to tell Bellos and was not sure that it would be fair.

The hare relaxed. The distant sounds of the war camp were no longer as unsettling as they had been. The skull drums of the she-bear, begun long before dawn, were no longer driving it mad.

Graine edged forward. She had never wanted to be a hunter, but her mother had asked it, the dazzling stranger, infinitely familiar, who had woken her with a hand on her ankle and an offering of fresh oat bannock and river water flavoured with dried elderflowers. Her mother had held her close and pressed her lips to Graine’s hair so that her breath warmed her head and there had been a moment’s safety in the unsafe world, and that, too, had been something to nurture before the morning snuffed it out.

“Would you help me find a hare?” her mother had asked. “A strong young doe, in young, but not too heavy so that she can still run fast. We’re not going to kill her. I have an idea of something that may help us today.”

Breaca had been with Airmid, clearly; the legacy of that hung around her like a cloak and made sharper her gaze so that she looked like the elder grandmother, except that the care was more evident, and that had made the morning brighter and less frightening.

There had been the challenge, then, of finding the right hare, and the unquestioning belief that she could do it, so that, rising from sleep and strange, intricate dreams, Graine had not questioned it, only splashed her face with the water and drunk a little, and tasted other things than elderflowers and then let out the web of her mind until a young, strong and pregnant hare was within it, and had walked and then crawled and then slithered within reach of it.

Her mother had a net. It was already set, hanging up on forked hazel twigs, so that it would fall and fold onto anything that ran into it. Graine had decided she did not want to rely on it. She marked the line of it in her mind, and moved on through the grass.

The hare could feel her, as she felt the hare. The moment of joining was a physical thing, the rebridging of an umbilical cord that each had sought, but not known how to find. Fear and hope came together; its fear was her fear, her hope was its hope, and the certainty of safety. She sang to it in her mind and it sang back high silvered notes, like the music of the moon.

The moon hung old and sharp and fading in the sky, but was still there to be seen, running ahead of the sun. They reached for it separately and together, the beast and the child of Nemain, two sides of a triangle that, once made, was not to be broken.

The hare lay down in its form and laid its ears to its head and sang. Graine sang and slid forward and gathered it, warm beast held safe in sanctuary against her warm skin, heartbeat to heartbeat, breath to breath, soul to soul with the moon between.

A long time later, she stood up, and walked through the drying grass to her mother and Stone, who said nothing, only reflected the sun in their honouring of her, and followed her back to the war camp where warriors who did not know what had been made sang their battle songs and braided their hair and the chattering skull drums of Cunomar’s she-bears had finally come to rest.

Airmid met them with a doeskin bag for the hare and sat with Graine by the last embers of Braint’s pyre and they sang to the beast of an ancient battle between the ancestors and the eagles in the days when the world was young.

Bellos came to sit beside Graine and she did not need to talk to him of the un-blinding and the new colours in the world. Instead, she said, “I don’t understand what has happened.”

“You have been to Mona and that is no small thing.” He had combed his white-gold hair and set a raven’s skull in it, for Briga. It looked like a jewel in the morning. “And then you were required to find the stone for Dubornos. He healed more than himself with the gift of his life.” He turned his face to her, in the way she had come to recognize on Mona, so that although his eyes were in the wrong place, his attention was on her. “When it was needed of you for Dubornos, how did you know you had found the right stone?”

“I felt it.”

“Did it call to you? As the hare called? And join as the hare joined?”

The hare was still joined. She could feel the tug of it against her belly and could not imagine a child being joined any more strongly. The joining to the stone had been less, a thread thin as spider’s silk. Without the more tangible feel of the hare, she would not have recognized it.

Bellos put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t hold that sense too hard, or chase the feel of it. Just stay with it and know how it is and be ready to know it again when it comes.”

He rose, smoothly. The hollow eyes of his raven’s skull stared down at her from his height. “You should stay here while the rest prepare for battle. I need to find Cunomar and then Hawk. Can you point me to one or the other?”

Her old brother and her new were together, which was a miracle in itself, although there was no clear peace between them. She showed Bellos where to find them and set his feet on the right path and settled back with the warm weight of the hare heavy against her and watched the warriors make themselves ready for war.

Cunomar said, “You are my brother.”

“Yes,” said Hawk. He bore the bear-blade of Eburovic on his back, and had set his hair in the Eceni way, with the warrior’s braid at the side. Someone had given him the small antler of a young buck and he had fixed that at his temple in place of kill-feathers and painted the serpent-spear on the top part of his sword arm. Everyone, by then, knew why.

One should love one’s brother, or at least not hate him.

They were evenly matched. If they had fought, Cunomar believed he would have won, but only because he had the advantage of the bear. New claw marks bled freshly on his shoulders, as on the shoulders of the two hundred others who had danced with him in front of Ardacos to the rhythms of the skull drums and given their souls afresh to the bear.

Hawk was not one of those, but he had sat on the margins, by Ardacos’ invitation, and had seen some of the mystery. Only the Boudica and Cygfa had been so permitted before. More even than Eburovic’s blade, it had affirmed Hawk’s place within the family.

Around them, the singing of the warriors had halted. Some were mounted, ready. Valerius’ cavalry was moving into a mass and beginning to organize into a semblance of squadrons, as he had shown them on the ride up from Lugdunum. Cygfa was a shining spear, drawing warriors behind her, like gulls behind a ship. The Boudica was talking with her honour guard. The horses were gathered and already sweating.

There was no time left for indecision. Cunomar was still undecided.

Hawk touched two fingers to the hilt of Eburovic’s blade, and then the serpent-spear on his arm. “I didn’t ask for this. It was freely given.”

“I know.”

Cunomar had heard it first from Breaca, and then Ardacos, and then Cygfa. Standing by Braint’s pyre with his mother newly returned, there had been too much havoc in his heart and head to make sense of yet another new strand. In the brisk morning, with the mist clearing and battle close, he still did not know which way to turn.

A new voice said, “If you would be a match for each other in combat, how much would you both combined be a match against the legions?”

Bellos spoke from Cunomar’s side, the bright-haired Belgic youth whom he had met as a frightened slave boy in Gaul and who had become, it seemed, a dreamer of Mona, given to Briga; and blind; he had been told that in the night, too.

Hawk knew him, and respected him. He gave the salute of warrior to dreamer and then, unexpectedly, turned to Cunomar and gave the salute of warrior to warrior, and shield-mate. “If you would accept it, I would swear to fight as your shield-mate, to give my life for yours, to the ends of the earth and the four winds.”

The hair stood upright on Cunomar’s arms. The bear scars on his shoulder pulled tight, as if they were cut and then scabbed over and healed, all in one movement. He heard the harsh breath of the bear, and felt the moment of its death, as he had killed it. He said, “That oath is too old. I would not hold you to it.”

“But it’s an oath made within families. I offer it, knowing what it means.”

Bellos said, “You can’t accept it if you hate him, but you don’t yet have to love. Can you find something between these two?”

Cunomar thought about that. At length, he said, “I can respect and honour the courage of one who danced for the deer-elders, who would have given his life.” He still regretted not having been there. He looked to the last warmth of Braint’s fire and saw Graine. “Are you not already sworn to my sister?”

Hawk said, “The dreamers will stand together away from the battle and Graine will be with them. They’ll be behind the battle lines. If we’re lost, they are lost, but they know that. I spoke to your sister last night and she set me free to fight in the battle.” He offered a tentative smile. “On Mona, I taught her to fight. The legions should be more afraid of her than any of us.”

Graine was so small. If the tip of Eburovic’s blade were placed on the floor between her feet, the hilt would have reached almost to her chin. She would have been hard pushed to lift it, still less wield it, even had her grandfather not expressly forbidden her to touch it years before.

The absurdity of it reached a place beyond love or hate. Cunomar grinned fleetingly. “Then we can leave the dreamers in their safety.” With due gravity, he returned the warrior’s salute. “I accept your offer, but release you from it also so that you might fight with our mother. I’ll be on the left wing, while she leads the centre. She should have at least one of her children with her.”

“I accept. On the understanding that if the dreamers are in danger, you and I will come back alone or together to protect them, whatever may be happening elsewhere.”

Bellos said, “Thank you. We are all grateful for that.”

It could have been done just by the saying of it in the presence of a dreamer, but they clasped arms, hand to elbow, in the old way, so that they felt the mettle of each other for the first time since they had met.

Cunomar thought he was right, that he would have won if they fought, but that it would have been far closer than he had imagined and it was better by far to fight together against Rome. In the knowing of that, his nightmare of the bear turned at bay haunted him less.

Stepping away, he wanted to give something that would match the moment. “You should meet Ulla,” he said. “Come to the bear’s fire. There is time yet to introduce you before the final gathering begins.”

The Boudica addressed her war host from the back of the white-legged colt that was Cygfa’s heart-gift to her on the eve of battle.

She stood to the west, with the rising sun in front and Braint’s pyre rebuilt behind and all the Roman army gathering for its own address behind that.

She had not slept for two days, and felt as brisk as if she had just risen. The sun was within her, and the horned moon. The pulse of the earth was her own pulse. The gods walked within and without and death was all around, so that she could have stepped down from the colt and crossed any one of the unseen thresholds into the lands beyond life without any need for a battle, or even a stone hammered down to break open her head.

She was not ready to die, and might never be; life held too much promise.

Ahead was her hope for that promise. Fifty thousand warriors gathered, all given to her. All tribal marks were gone; Coritani fought alongside Cornovii and both beside Eceni and the sign of the serpent-spear was on everything. Once, the ancestor-dreamer would have been with her, behind or to one side or echoing snake-dry in the cave of her mind, declaring the mark as her own. There was no cave now, and no echo; she had claimed the mark for herself, and all that it had been and was and would be, and the gods did not gainsay her.

The warriors were silent, waiting. They had their backs to the east. Only she saw the moment when the sun broke free of the land, and parted the shadowing cloud as it had done at Camulodunum, but sooner, so that the fire of the gods met the fires of the warriors, and she the gateway between.

She raised her arms to her war host. A forest of spears stabbed the sky in silent answer. A great wave of polished shield bosses caught the sun and sent forward an ocean of light that flowed round her and emptied into Braint’s pyre.

She did not try to speak to them; she could speak to a thousand, three thousand, possibly ten thousand, but not to the fifty thousand who faced her and as many refugees who waited beyond them with any hope of being heard.

Even so, they needed something from her to carry them into war.

Her family were around her; Airmid and the dreamers on one side, her sons and daughters on the other and Valerius at the meeting point between. The sun was their signal. Unpractised, but planned, Valerius and Cygfa moved forward on foot, carrying one of the great round war shields of the Votadini between them. They held it flat at shoulder height as a platform. Hawk and Cunomar brought Graine to it and, between them, they lifted her onto it, so that she stood level with her mother, in sight of the full fifty thousand.

Her balance was good; astonishing in fact. She had dressed carefully, in a tunic of undyed wool with edged hemming in Eceni blue. Her hair was a rich, dark ox-blood and hung flat down her back, sleek as polished wood. She said, “Now, while they are quiet,” and held out her hands.

In view of the full fifty thousand, with the children among the throng all reared on stories of the heroes, and of how children had brought them water in the heart of combat, and so enabled them to rise again and win the battle, Breaca of the Eceni and of Mona, Boudica of the tribes, lifted the torc of her ancestors from her neck and placed it in the waiting hands of her daughter.

They had not planned clearly what came next. Graine’s face became still. In front of thousands, she closed her eyes and dipped her head and pressed her brow to the arc of the torc, then raised it to the sun as if she might drain the sky of light and hold it in the gold. Last, she slipped it about her own neck.

It was too large, and she too small, and they were both radiant.

Slowly, the Boudica raised her blade. Ardacos came, with the bear-warriors of his own choosing, who had been with him since the days on Mona, and Ulla and the others of the younger she-bear, and Civilis with a handful of his Batavians and half of Valerius’ cavalry, so that she was surrounded by warriors on foot and on horseback. Together, they made the salute of warriors to a dreamer, all for the Boudica’s daughter.

In the profound quiet that followed, there was some chance of being heard.

Facing an ocean of light, with her daughter at her side, Breaca raised her voice and cast it to the thousands. “This is what we fight for, and why we must win. Never forget it, however long the battle lasts.”

She finished, and sheathed her blade, and then Stone rose up and planted his forefeet on either side of her leg and raised his head and gave voice to the belled tones of a war hound, in the way of the heroes’ hounds in the winter tales, and she had not planned that at all.

For perhaps two heartbeats more, there was silence. Then the roar began, loud, and louder and louder yet, because it mattered that they rock the earth and the sky with the power of their voices, that they tell the legions what they already knew: that they were outnumbered and outmatched and would spend their last hours fighting a losing battle against a war host that was unassailable.

Behind them, starting slowly and growing, the legions and cavalry wings of Rome did their best to outmatch them; and failed.

They waited a long time for the shouting to cease, and the hammer of blades on shields to die away.

The sun was higher, and the shadows sharper. Valerius said, “Graine? It might be good if we set you down.”

With difficulty, Graine brought her mind back from the far distant place where the torc had taken it. The hare in its sack sang to her quietly, so that she had a thread to follow home. She smiled for her mother’s brother, who had fathered a child in the night and did not yet know how that had changed him.

“Yes, thank you.” Her voice was not her own, but in the clamour of almost-war, it was barely noticed.

They set her to earth gently. The sun was blinding. The moon sang too loudly. She swayed and Cygfa held her up. Being on the shield had been easier.

Her mother said, “Graine? Is it the torc?” That voice came more clearly through the siren calls of the other worlds.

She turned to where she thought Breaca might be. “I don’t know.”

The gold was lifted from her neck. The singing stopped and she could see. Her mother had dismounted and was crouched in front of her, settling the torc round her own neck. She kissed Graine on the forehead and the ground ceased to heave.

“We are learning,” Breaca said, “This is not for you yet.” She stood back and studied her daughter. Her face was Briga’s face, mother of all life and the compassion of death. “We have to begin the battle shortly. Are you well enough to help me with the hare?”

“Yes.” Nothing would have kept her from that.

They began very soon. Valerius, who had been to the top of the ridge and back, said, “The legions are gathered. He has the cavalry at the wings and the Fourteenth are standing shoulder to shoulder across the width between. The valley’s mouth is a line of iron. There is no way to come at them but from the front.”

Breaca said, “Thank you. You said they would do that. Does he have the hounds with him?”

“Of course. He knows this is his day to live or die. He wouldn’t be without them now.”

Graine had never been at the forefront of a war host. Her mother’s arm was on her shoulder, shielding her as a hawk shields her young. Even so, moths fluttered at her diaphragm and her mouth was stickily dry.

Breaca looked down and smiled the same, tentative smile she had offered once, on a dawn morning, before they had really come to know one another. “Shall we go, heart of life? I think this day is better started.”

Her mother mounted. Valerius swung Graine up before her on the black colt with the white legs and Airmid handed her the hare in its sack. It was too late for talking. The colt swung round to face the enemy. The last murmur of the war host halted. In silence, Breaca of the Eceni, Boudica of nations, raised her blade, and in silence sent her colt forward. Two spear-lengths behind, her war host followed.

The ridge was barely the height of a man; enough only to shield the armies of both sides from each other.

At the crest, they dismounted. Nemain’s beast was of the earth, and must not be sent to battle from horseback; her mother’s dreams had shown that. The legions waited, as Valerius had said, locked within the safe walls of the valley so that none could come at them but from the front. They stood in perfect rows; shield met square-edged shield in a band of red and black, while polished helmets, sun-welded each to the next, made a brazen line that blurred the faces of the men beneath so that each man was the same, a grain of sand in the ocean of the army. On either side, the cavalry waited, set out in squares on horses that were carved from stone.

Suetonius Paulinus, governor of Britannia, was in front of them all, mounted on a red horse half a hand higher than any around it. His cloak was black and flowed over its haunches in the way of the statues in Camulodunum. His helmet plumes were white and stuck upright, as straight and high as the limed hair of Cunomar’s she-bears.

His two smooth-pelted running dogs were leashed and held by a young and very striking warrior of the Atrebates, who bore clan marks that could be seen from halfway across the field. It mattered, clearly, for Rome to be seen to have at least one ally among the tribes.

It was impossible not to stop, faced by that. It was necessary to go forward. Graine felt her mother’s hand light on her back and heard her mother’s voice say, “Shall we show them who we are?” and they walked down the ridge on foot, with only Stone for company so that, for a moment, it must have seemed to the waiting legions that the Boudica came to face them with only a child and a lame hound and no warriors at all behind her. The cheer then was of derision and the waves of it battered them, as a storm batters a ship.

They were at the foot of the ridge when the entire line of the Boudica’s war host crested the ridge.

The legions fell to silence as if their officers had commanded it. The quiet was of a sucked breath, and a cramped hand clenching.

Against all pride, Graine glanced over her shoulder. She faltered and was still and so Breaca, too, had to turn and look and even she, who had called her war host into being, drew a breath at what she had made.

Warriors and warriors and warriors stood poised in an endless, beautiful, wild and savage row; men and women, naked and armoured, painted and plain, gold-haired and black, unmounted and mounted on horses of every height in a havoc of clashing colours, of skin, of hair, of tunic and cloak, in Mona’s grey and the gorse yellow of the Trinovantes and the dusk-sky blue of the Eceni and stolen white messenger-cloaks that had once belonged to the enemy, bearing the great-spears of the Votadini and the axes of the Dumnonii and the ancestor-blades of the horse warriors and the wicked, two-edged knives of the limed and painted she-bear.

They were magnificent in their disorder and the power of their self-belief and on every shield, turned to the fore, was the serpent-spear of the Boudica, painted in red the colour of newly shed horse blood, set on and never allowed to dry.

For the two of them alone, Graine said, “It’s your dream from the ancestors’ cave: the Roman eagle crushed and the serpent-spear flying over in victory.”

The Boudica was all of them, made one. Her smile drew the gods from their watching place and made them flesh and blood on the earth. She laid her arm on her daughter’s shoulder and Graine could have become a warrior then, with the power it gave her.

Breaca said, “Then come with me and make it happen,” and they walked together the last few steps towards the long sloping plain at the foot of the ridge.