Dreaming the Eagle Read Online Free PDF Page A

been the same every night since the autumn. In it, he slept with his sword in his hand, not hanging from the wall, and he did not keep apart from the women, for all that Graine was in the first throes of childbirth. He heard the warriors approach before they began the work of killing and he was there in time, standing in their path, swinging sharp and savage iron to halt their advance. In his dream none died but the Coritani. The first three fell to his hammer and his blade combined, long before they reached the women. The last, as in reality, died on his daughter’s spear. He ended each night standing in a doorway facing her across the body of the fallen man, feeling the simmering ecstasy of battle ring through his head and pride fill his heart. The dawn sun sang in over his shoulder, setting fire to her hair, her smile, her shining spear-tip. She raised her weapon in salute and he thought his heart would burst with the joy of it. Then, always, he saw her eyes. In life, they were a burnished green with small threads of copper spreading out from the core, a colour all their own. Here, from the doorway of his dream, he looked into the late-summer blue of her mother’s eyes and the smile that fired them was the one that had burned into his heart long before he became a father. It was the smile that made him remember his loss and brought back the crippling grief. Weeping, he watched his daughter open her mouth and knew that she spoke with the voice of her mother. He strained to hear but her words were lost in the tides of pain and always he woke before they could reach him. Now, he sat in the dark and felt the ache as he had each morning, made greater this time by the understanding that Breaca, too, had dreamed of the deaths and he had not known.
    ‘It is not a good thing for a child to dream so,’ he said.
    ‘She knows it. She is working as she feels she must. It is not for you to stop her.’
    ‘No.’ He eased his blade back into its sheath and stood. His tunic lay folded on his bed-skins. He slid it over his head.
    ‘You would go to her?’ The ancient voice nagged like an aching tooth and the scorn was directed entirely at him. ‘Would she work in the dark if she wanted you?’
    ‘I woke early from my dream,’ he said and realized that it was the first time he had done so. ‘Perhaps I need to see what she is doing.’
    ‘She is teaching herself patience.’ The grandmother dismissed it as nothing. Both of them knew it was not. ‘It is not before time.’
    ‘Then I will look. I will offer help only if she asks for it. I will do nothing to stop her.’ He stepped past the fire to the door-skin. An elderly bitch thought to follow. He pushed on her muzzle and turned her back. She padded away to his sleeping place and dug herself a bed amongst his hides. He waited until she had settled and then let himself out.
    The forge stood away from the roundhouse, on the far side of the compound, with its front entrance facing south so that sparks from the fire might not, in dry weather, set fire to the thatch of the roundhouse and cause ruin. The building itself was made of wood with slatted hazel for the roof and he wet it himself regularly so that it would not burn. The floor was beaten earth, damped and trodden and glazed by the fire until it was flat and imperviously smooth, except at the doorway where the hens had scraped a dust bowl and lay in it on occasion, basking in the heat.
    There were no hens at night. They had roused themselves at dusk, pecking their way with the last of the light to the safe roost under the eaves of the granary, and he had sealed the door-skin behind them, laying a row of river stones along the skirt, so that the furnace, free of draught, might keep its heat in the Trough to the dawn. Coming on it now in the light of the moon, Eburovic saw the haze rising straight from the smoke hole and knew the fires were not sleeping. At the door-flap, he found that the stones had been laid aside, arranged