Dreaming the Hound by Manda Scott Read Free Book Online Page B

him a horse of my own breeding and with my own hands made the knife with which he kills. I loved him and was overjoyed when Luain mac Calma brought him back from Rome. He knows this, but still he leaves the roundhouse when I enter and will not come near me from the summer’s start to its end. My son is a stranger who hunts with the she-bears and I do not know how to reach him.’
    And so you, too, hunt alone, neither desiring nor requesting his company?
    He was her father; she could never lie to him. He was a ghost, who had access to the many layers of truth.
    Breaca said, ‘I could not hunt with Cunomar. He is not safe. He has killed and lived to tell of it only because the she-bears hunt as a pack and three or more are assigned each time to his protection.’
    The truth broke through the worlds so that she saw her son whether she wanted to or not. In another place and another time, Cunomar turned his head and stared at his mother with a stranger’s eyes. She met his gaze and tried to imagine him weeping tears of gold, and could not.
    Because she had heard Graine, and seen Cunomar, so then also she saw Cygfa, Caradoc’s daughter, who was not the child of Breaca’s flesh but had become the child of her soul.
    As Cunomar had been, so Cygfa, too, had been captured and taken prisoner to Rome with Caradoc, their father. Exactly as Cunomar had, she had stood in the shadow of the cross and thought herself about to be hanged on it. Exactly unlike Cunomar, she had drawn in strength from the core of herself and had not succumbed to bitterness afterwards.
    When Cygfa had gone out to sit her long-nights and came back a woman, ablaze with her dreaming, Breaca had been the one who spoke for her before the elders and hailed her as daughter in all ways but those of flesh, which were ever the least.
    Tall as her father and as beautiful, she braided kill-feathers by the handful into her hair before battle and mounted a horse of her own breeding. Warriors crowded close to touch her blade for the luck it would give and there was no doubt that she would fight well and kill cleanly, and that if she died in conflict it would be only because Briga had need of her in the other worlds. In all the battles since her return from Rome, she had fought at the side of the Boudica, brilliantly.
    From somewhere distant, the ancestor said, You love her as a daughter. The children of your blood see it daily and mourn. Do you wonder that they cleave closer to others than to you?
    Breaca lay on cold stone at the river’s edge, her mouth a desert for lack of water. She was too hot, and too cold, shuddering. Her breath was not enough to give true voice to her words. She answered, whispering, ‘You twist the truth. My children know themselves equal in my eyes.’
    Are you sure?
    ‘Yes.’
    She was not sure. Her whispered voice said so, and the rush of the water, and the ancestor’s words, growing ever more faint.
    You are Eceni. It is your blood and your right and your duty. It is not too late to keep the children from weeping. Only find a way to give back to the people the heart and courage they have lost. Find a way to call forth the warriors and to arm them, find at least one with courage to match yours and you may prevail. At the last, find the mark that is ours and seek its place in your soul. Come to know it, and you will prevail.
    The ancestor’s words etched a serpent-spear in the darkness, cast in fire, hung against a summer sky.
    The snake, having two heads, watched past and future, writhing. The spear was crooked, as if broken. Its two blades pointed down and up, to earth and sky, joining the realm of the people to the realm of the gods.
    Others joined it, chiselled into the living rock over and again on the walls of the cave from floor to unreachable roof. Anywhere and everywhere, the twin-headed serpent gazed equally to past and future and the crooked spear lay across, joining the gods to their people. The fire guttered and gave more light,