CHAPTER 46

Valerius rode in the memory of a dream become a nightmare. He rode a white-splashed black horse at speed from a battlefield, but it was Graine who clung on behind him, not Breaca. His sister was on the race-bred grey filly, held on by the wrap of her own cloak that bound her and kept her from falling.

Her family surrounded her; an honour guard of blood and spirit sworn to shield her with their lives. Cunomar rode on one side with Stone slung across his saddle; in the midst of battle, as they shouted orders for the rear guard, he had stopped to pick up the hound his mother loved. Ulla followed him, with Hawk and Cygfa on the sword side. Airmid, Bellos and Theophilus came bunched together behind.

They galloped fast, but not fast enough to outrun the blood that Breaca was losing, nor, possibly, the half-wing of tiring cavalry who followed, led by Sabinius, who had been standard-bearer even in Valerius’ time and, like Civilis, should have died long since. He drove his men like one possessed, screaming Corvus’ name.

Ardacos was there to stop him, standing in a circle drawn in the dirt, oath-sworn to remain there until death forced him out, to take as many of the enemy with him as he could, knowing those who died on either side would serve as worthy companions in the long trek through the other-forests to the welcome of the she-bear in whose care they might rest and hunt and fight and rest again, for ever blessed.

He was not alone. Fifty of his own warriors, old, scarred men and women who had lived two decades in the care of the she-bear, drew their own circles in the earth and made the line on either side of Ardacos. Behind them, in a second row, stood Scerros and the younger warriors who had followed Cunomar.

One other was there, newly come to their ranks: seeing them make their stand, and only barely understanding, Knife had swung off his horse and joined them, swearing his soul to the bear as had only ever been done twice before on the field of battle; and now a third time.

They were of the bear and the bear was in them and Valerius had no doubt they would sell their lives dearly, but that the cavalry would still overwhelm them. To buy more time than they alone could manage, Longinus drew together the horse-warriors of Mona to stand on either side of this line of living shields. Thus was Valerius’ oath to him broken; to stay now in the chaos of the retreat was to die. They had both known that in the frantic moments of parting.

“I will wait for you in the gods’ care,” Longinus had said, “however long it takes. Don’t forget me, when you meet the others who will be awaiting you.”

Valerius had clasped him close and kissed him. “I won’t forget. Beyond life, there are no limits to love. I will come to you, and there will be time, then, for all that has never been said.”

“It would be good to hear that.”

They had parted then, and not too soon. Huw had stayed to help Longinus, and Madb and all the horse-warriors of Mona and of the Eceni, and there had been no time for a proper parting from any of them. The trumpets were calling and those who remained faced more than the remnants of the Quinta Gallorum; the last cohorts of the XXth were coming from where they had waited through all the long day for their moment of triumph.

The battlefield was a slaughterhouse, and the refugees in their wagons were as sheep awaiting the cull. Between and beyond, warriors stayed to fight, or ran, as their instincts drove them; whichever they chose, most of them died.

There was room for hope that Ardacos’ bears and the horse-warriors who fought under Longinus’ command were better led and better trained and so might live, but numbers did not tell in their favour.

They were giving their lives so that the Boudica’s honour guard might live; it mattered to remember that. Valerius ran his hand along the black coat and it came back wet with sweat and other men’s blood as it had in all the repetitions of his dream. His horse jumped a log. A long-practised part of him waited to fall off as they landed, and did not.

Airmid came up alongside. Breaca’s blood stained her tunic. Clotted streaks of it painted her face. She looked more fearsome than the she-bear had ever done.

Over the thunder of running horses, she said to Valerius, “In the dream of your childhood your left hand was cut off at the wrist. If you have altered that much with the changing paths of your life, we can be grateful.”

He shouted back, “I would rather lose a hand than lose Breaca.”

“We’re not given that choice. We can’t change what has happened, only keep Graine safe, and Cygfa, and the child she will bear. Do you know of anywhere we can go so that Breaca can be quiet at the end? A god-space would be good, if there are any in the mountains that will hold us.”

Thus did Airmid of Nemain give Valerius of Nemain and Mithras the key to all that was of the other part of him. He looked for a peak he knew, and measured the distance to it.

“If we can ride hard, there’s a cave that I know of, given in recent years to Mithras, but other gods were there first. It’s near the fortress of the Twentieth but that’s empty; Paulinus pulled every last man and servant out for the attack on Mona.”

“Can you get us there in time, do you think?”

“Yes.” His horse was fresher than any of those who might follow, and it had been trained by Civilis, who was one of the greatest horsemen of his age.

Valerius set his courage and his mount to the first of the slopes that led to the mountain and heard the others follow him. They were nine, and one of them dying, and they left behind a battle whose loss spelled the ending of a nation.

The rider walked his horse out of the trees near dusk, as they made the foot of the mountain. Valerius swung his blade at the misted shape, and then drew it back again, hissing through his teeth.

“You’re late,” he said. “The battle’s over.”

“If the battle were what mattered most, then I would, indeed, be late,” said his father, Luain mac Calma, Elder of Mona. He moved his mare alongside the white-legged colt so they rode head to head up the track. “Are you going to the cave of the bull-god?”

“Unless you have something better.”

“Not at all.”

“Will you come?” It surprised Valerius how much he wanted that.

“I think not. You can do all that is needed. I’ll wait here, and guide you to Mona after. The island is safe for now, and when it is no longer so, we have a welcome in Hibernia for everyone who survives the battle. There will be more than you fear and less than you hope.”

Valerius did not have the heart to think of more dead. “Will Rome make Mona unsafe?” he asked.

“Yes, and eventually Hibernia too, but not in our lives, or our children, or our children’s children, and there will be time before that to do what is needed so that the line may survive while the land is in thrall to the descendants of Rome. Go now. Breaca needs you more than a future that may never happen.”

They came to Mithras’ cave at dusk, exhausted and riding spent horses, and found the place abandoned to the gods of stone and water.

The waterfall outside with its spreading hazels was thin with a summer’s lack of rain. A winter’s rock fall had partly obscured the entrance. A jar of honey had been stuffed into a crevasse, and someone had offered a child’s toy sword, not yet rusted. Otherwise, Valerius could see no sign that anyone had been up since he had so rashly removed the false trappings of the god.

He was too tired to think. He let the colt slow to a halt and dropped to the ground on legs that would barely hold him. The grey race-filly slowed with him. Breaca lay along its neck, pliant as a child in sleep.

“Is she still alive?” That Airmid had to ask made the question more urgent.

“Yes.”

He left them and used his hands to scoop aside the worst of the rubble from the entrance. All the way up the mountain he had thought of the tight, snaking passage and the last difficult drop into the cave. Cygfa, Cunomar and Hawk had joined him by then, clearing stones. Theophilus filled waterskins from the river. Bellos and Airmid held Graine safe between them, and kept Stone holding to life.

Valerius said, “The way in is hard even when you’re awake and whole. We’ll need light inside. I’ll go in first, and light a fire and come back.”

He lit more than a fire. In their haste to abandon their shrine, the officiates of the bull-god had left behind reed torches hung on iron wall brackets and a handful of honey-tallow candles and a miniature brazier, still heavy with old charcoal, and a cache of tinder lodged beneath.

He lit both from the ember-pot Airmid had given him and crouched, breathing life into the flame until the light loosed its rippling, incandescent magic across the gods’ lake at one side of the cave, and lit to brilliance the eternal shining wetness of the walls and ceiling that arched above.

Once, he had been blinded by the magnificence of the gods’ fire laid across water in the utter darkness of the cave. Now, he stood surrounded by jewelled light and his heart was a black cavern, filled with too much fear to acknowledge beauty, or remember awe.

From the numbness of utter loss, he asked the favour of both of his gods to remain in this place that had been most recently given only to one of them. Mithras did not walk to him across the water with his hound at his heels as he had once done, but Valerius allowed himself to feel a sense of welcome, and carried it to those waiting outside.

The way in was hard, and harder with Breaca, who was cool by then, and slippery with her own sweat. They carried her to the lake’s edge, where the brazier had settled to glowing coals and made the water a sheet of lost blood. The blushing scarlet gave her colour, so that she looked almost well, as if she slept in the wake of battle and might rise again, and fight again and this time win.

So that she might be warm and comfortable, they made a bed of folded cloaks and a pillow from the sheepskin saddle pad from Graine’s pony. They set Stone alongside her and he had life enough left for his warmth to reach her. Airmid sat by her head, Bellos by her feet, Valerius held one side and Cygfa the other. Graine sat near the brazier, silent and white. Hawk kept vigil near the entrance, and left after a while, to leave signs for Cunomar and Ardacos, in case they should survive and should track them this far.

He came back and nothing had changed but that more blood had seeped from the wound in Breaca’s side, staining the pale blue of her cloak. He took his place again in silence.

Then there was nothing to do but wait.

“Graine?”

The voice was a sigh on the wind, althought it was easy to hear her mother within it. No-one else heard it, or they had the sense to know it a product of the tumbling air within the cave, or they were simply too focused now on the death that was coming.

Graine did not know how to call the gods as they were needed now. She had watched Airmid from the beginning. The tall dreamer had called Nemain so close that she and the god were one, and still she was beyond weeping. Bellos was watching Briga as if he alone might keep her at bay. Valerius had not yet called his gods, as if to do so in this place was sacrilege, or an admission of defeat. Hawk had called on no-one, only asked whosoever might listen for a miracle, and did not expect it given.

“Graine!”

Sharper now, and louder. No-one else moved. Graine touched the back of her hand to the brazier to make sure she was awake. The burn made her swear. The blister began to swell even as she sucked it. Without asking permission of those who sat with her mother, she took up one of the beeswax candles and went to find the voice.

She sought darkness, away from the flowing blood of the brazier. At the back of the cave was a torn gap around an altar carved from the living rock. The wind did not settle there. She turned away from it, towards the blank wall, and found that her candle sent light into a sucking space from which no reflection came back.

The entrance to the inner cave, when she found it, was narrow and reached to the roof. She passed through it sideways and stood in a blackness so profound she might have lost her sight and become blind as Bellos, except that she could see the uncertain light of the candle, and so herself.

The wind snuffed the candle out. She felt a pressure, and a testing and was not unwelcome.

“Graine. Come.” It was a kind wind, or she chose to believe it so. She walked forward with her hands stretched out.

Presently, she felt a wall and turned to her left and walked with her shoulder against it, so that when it bent again the other way, as the waves of a snake, she was able to follow, slowly, in case the ground fell away.

She saw the light then, a grey feathering in the absolute black. As dawn that comes soon after midnight, her eyes feasted on it, taking in fine ridges in the rock, and the wear on the floor, as from the passing of many thousand feet over many hundreds of generations.

She followed the grey, then, round another sinuous curve; and stopped.

The kind wind smoothed her face. The grey rock was steady behind her. Ahead, a vent in the towering roof let in the late evening light. To either side of that vent, down the steep, arched angles of the roof, the rock was not grey, but the colour of late winter ice, streaked and cracked and imperfect, but still sharp-edged as knife blades so that the million facets took the faint light and bounced it forward and back and out and down and made of the grey a rainbow of monochrome shades.

There was light enough to see the extent of the new chamber, to walk across it and find the place where a fire, or many fires, had once scorched the plain stone of the floor and sent smoke to streak the flawed brilliance of the roof; to scramble up on a rock bench and find the place where the wall folded in on itself to make a bed, and so to find the remains of the body that had been left to lie there, so long ago that the flesh had melted and the skin had dried onto the bones and the torc that had once lain so cleanly round the throat had fallen askew and was twisting the neck and the great blade that had kept guard for so long had dipped down between the arched bones of the pelvis.

On a day of so much grief, that seemed too much. She reached for the end-loops of the torc to straighten the thing, and let the dead lie in better order.

“Graine?”

The voice was very clearly not the wind. She turned fast, as if caught in some wrong doing; and stopped again, for a second time, frozen.

Her mother was there.

The world broke apart, and was remade, perfect. Graine sagged against the stone. Relief flooded over her in scalding waves that left her damp and shivering with slick skin and hair that pricked on her scalp. “You’re better,” she said. Her voice came out as a whisper.

Her mother opened her arms and Graine came to them, and it was as it had been, before the procurator came with his veterans and his endless harm. Here was a haven of warmth and comfort and strength and the heartbeat of a warrior who could take on Rome and beat the legions back into the ocean and free the land for ever for the gods and the people. Before all of that, she was Breaca, daughter of one Graine who was dead, mother to this Graine, who was so very alive.

She sat now near the place where the fire had been, and seemed a little tired, but not more than anyone who has spent all day in battle and has not slept for two nights before. She pressed her lips to Graine’s head and blew a long lungful of breath so that the perfect heat of it passed down through her crown to the soles of her feet, shivering. Graine reached up, and took a handful of fox-red hair that was still rough with dried sweat. She combed it, gently, with her fingers.

Her mother said, “Did you find the torc? The one in the stone chamber?”

“Yes. I didn’t move it, though. I was going to, but I didn’t.”

“You should. It’s yours. You can take it now.”

“But—”

Don’t argue now, child. There isn’t time.

Graine looked up. The elder grandmother was there, brisk and sharp as she had ever been. Her eyes gleamed like a hawk’s in the strange light. She smiled, which was never a comfortable thing.

Take the torc. You’ll need it. The other can be left here after.

“The other…?” There was only one torc, which was her mother’s. Graine looked at the elder grandmother, who smiled as if she had done something particularly clever, and nodded.

And so she knew, and the world was not perfect, but broken beyond all hope.

She fell back against the wall, and reached for her mother, who was not truly there. “I’m not ready,” she whispered, “I’m too young. The elder grandmother came to you like this on your long-nights, after she was dead. I’m not old enough for that, you can’t leave me, you can’t…”

“I know. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t, there’s too much to do, but I can’t stay. All I can do is leave you a gift, and the torc is it. Will you take it now, while I’m here?”

“What about yours? And the blade lying on the bones in the stone cleft?”

“The blade in the stone is for Hawk, to have in exchange for Eburovic’s blade, which must be left here with me. You do understand that? I am to lie here in the place of the ancestors, with the bear-blade and the torc of the Ecini. Tell Airmid. She’ll know what to do.”

“How can you leave her? She loves you.”

“Unfair, light of my soul, unfair…” He mother leaned over and kissed her. The breath did not reach to her scalp, still less to her feet. She sounded sad, but not bereft, as she should have done. “I will wait for her, as we all do, on the river’s far bank. She knows that, too. I will wait for you, also, and for your children and your children’s children; I will be their strength to the ends of the earth and the four winds; tell them that as they are growing so that they might always remember. But for now, I must go. Will you take up the torc? Please? I would see you have it before I leave.”

If Graine could have slowed time by standing with the torc untaken, she would have stood for the rest of her life and beyond. Already, others were gathering; the ancestor-dreamer was there, and Macha, who had sent Valerius to her in the dream, and her grandfather, whose blade she had touched and so had brought ruin to her mother, and a man she did not know, with blazing yellow hair and the sign of the Sun Hound on his signet ring. When she saw Dubornos, standing near with the crows of Briga on either side, she knew she could not wait longer.

The ancestor’s torc was narrower than her mother’s, and had white gold in the nine-wired weaving alongside the rich Siluran red. It settled on her own neck as if moulded for it, with the open end-pieces hanging solidly over her collar bones. She took her hands away, and waited for the world to become void, as it had when she wore her mother’s torc.

Nothing happened. She was disappointed, and surprised. Then she felt the light press of her mother’s lips and the breath reached again through her crown to her toes. The light of the cave became richer and the ghosts within it more solid. The elder grandmother tipped her head to one side and eyed her critically.

A lot of learning still unlearned, for one so gifted. Do not begin to think you have the answers. If you ever do, hubris will kill you.

She wanted to say she would not care what killed her if she could join her mother, but Breaca was there, kneeling in front, taking the silver feather from her own neck and fastening it to Graine’s, looped across the two end-rings so that it balanced between. “The feather is my gift alone, not from the lineage or the gods or the past. Tell Airmid I said so. She’ll make it happen.”

Breaca stepped back. The other ghosts had gone, except Dubornos, who waited, and the shade of a god, of all gods, that waited with him.

“You should go back now,” she said. “You are all of the future, and all of the past. Live for that, and never forget that I love you,” and was gone.