Dreaming the Bull Read Online Free PDF

defeat the enemy. But it was three-legged Hail for whom his mother waited, for whom she would always wait, sire to Stone and uncounted others. The great white-spotted war hound had once belonged to Breaca’s brother Bán and, because of that, was now and for ever the most beloved of the Boudica’s beasts.
    The singers told more tales of Bán, lost brother to theBoudica, than of any other hero, living or dead. For one who had died before he ever sat his long-nights, the litany of Bán’s achievements was dauntingly long. Hare-hunter, horse-dreamer and healer, he had been born with power such as had not been seen since the time of the ancestors. His first battle had shown him also to be a warrior; as a child not yet come to manhood, he had, they said, fought and killed at least twenty of the enemy before he was tricked into carelessness and slain. The tragedy was made worse by the fact that it had been Amminios, brother to Caradoc, who had betrayed the boy-hero and slain him. The singers played heavily on that; it would have been far less of a tale if the traitor had been an unknown warrior from another land.
    They sang of the hero’s hound, Hail, in the same tones and often in the same songs as they did of Bán, telling of the beast’s outstanding courage in battle and his prowess in the hunt. From when he was too young fully to understand the words, Cunomar had listened to his mother’s voice singing him to sleep, so that he dreamed through the nights of a god-touched boy who killed with the ease of a man and of his three-legged war hound who belonged now to the Boudica and had claimed for ever a large part of her soul.
    Cunomar had tried to love Hail as his mother did but had not succeeded. In the spring, when a dog whelp had been born with the same white ear and spattering of white spots on its coat as its sire, Cunomar had hoped that perhaps his mother’s affections might shift so that the new hound would displace the old, but it had not been so. The whelp had been named Rain because there could only ever be one Hail, and although Breaca had cherished it and spent too much of her time in training it, Hail was still the onewho ran at her side on the morning of battle and it was Hail before whom she crouched now, in whose pelt her fingers dug deep so that her nose was level with his nose and to whom she spoke as if the hound were a warrior and could understand.
    The hound grumbled deep in its throat and when the Boudica let go, it sighed and turned to make its stilted way to Cunomar’s side. Hail was too big, that was part of the trouble. The great head loomed over the child’s so that the boy had to look up into its eyes. He thought it regarded him with disdain, measuring him against those who had given their lives in battle and finding him not of their stature.
    With an effort, Cunomar dragged his gaze away. Breaca had come to crouch before him as she had before the hound, with her face close to his, smiling. He reached out and hugged her, burying his face in the crook of her neck, breathing her in to the depths of his chest. He thought she should have smelled differently today, of battle and resolution, but she smelled as she always did, of sheep’s wool and horse sweat and a little of hound spittle where Hail had licked her face and she had not wiped it away, and over all of those, she smelled of herself: his mother who would never change.
    Cunomar’s hair was corn-gold like his father’s. She smoothed it, tucking it behind his ears. Her lips pressed into his crown and he knew she was speaking but not what she said; the words were Eceni and too difficult for a boy raised on Mona amongst the dialects of the west. He ached for knowing she must go when he so badly wanted her to stay and be
his
Boudica, to blaze with the wildfire just for him.
    Instead she smiled the secret smile that she kept for herson and his father and said, “My warrior-to-be, I’m sorry, I have to leave you. The beacon fire says the enemy