Dreaming the Hound Read Online Free PDF Page B

an elder grandmother among horses, and she had not been well cared for. Her back was swayed from the bearing of too many foals. The weariness of travel and of living hung around her as the first taste of death. Her coat was red, the colour of cut liver, with white scars on her flanks. An
    old brand showed indistinctly at the base of her neck.
    Once, long ago, when the mare was in summer coat and groomed to perfection, the brand had been clear: Leg VIII Aug; a cavalry mare of the VII th Augusta, she had been given to a boy of the Eceni who had known of her from a dream.
    It had been so very long ago. One might hope that a summer of shared joy with a battle at its end would have left as strong a memory with the mare as it did the boy who rode her, but her eyes lacked hope and met the smith’s without recognition. Hoarsely he said, ‘She’s too old to be in foal.’
    ‘I think not. It will be her last, but she will do it well. Would you rather she foaled it under the care of another man? I can take her back to Mona if you wish.’
    Mac Calma knew all the ways to a man’s heart and did not disdain to use them. The smith did not trust himself to speak, but nodded when Bellos looked at him and then watched as the boy ran to the mare and offered her a lick of salt that he kept in his palm. It was not the first he had given her; Bellos had been a slave once, and knew intimately the hurts of slavery in another, and how to assuage them.
    Finding his voice again, the smith said, ‘Her heart is broken. What is left of it, she has given to the boy.’
    Mac Calma did not disagree. ‘But her foal will give his heart to whomsoever trains him for battle. Airmid believes it will be a colt, black and white with a shield and a spear on its forehead. I have no reason to disbelieve her.’
    The smith let his gaze rest on the horizon a while before he trusted himself to speak. ‘It was a mistake, clearly, to speak aloud the dreams of my childhood. I was young then, and over-trusting. But that dream is long dead and cannot be revived. It died when Amminios made me a slave and took my battle mount into his breeding herds, and if Breaca is dead, then the dream can never be brought alive again; she was the biggest part of it.’
    ‘Did I say that Breaca was dead?’
    They were a sword’s length apart. Valerius, once-officer of the cavalry, still held the half-made blade in his hand, alive with the first stirrings of the weapon it would be. With no clear effort on his part, the tip rose to the level of the other man’s throat. Very quietly, he said, ‘Don’t play with me, dreamer.’
    Mac Calma stood side on to the sun. His shadow, impossibly,
    took the shape of the heron that was his dream. He shook his head. ‘I would never play with you. I did not intend any misunderstanding. It is not Breaca who is dead, but Silla, your younger sister, the only one of the royal line to remain in the lands of the Eceni. She died bearing a child for Prasutagos, whom you knew as ‘Tagos, who has named himself king of the entire Eceni nation. He is a supporter of Rome and there is nothing now to check him. If he is not removed, the Eceni - who were your mother’s people, even if you claim they are no longer yours - will become enslaved to Rome in ways we cannot break.’
    It is not Breaca who is dead …
    Valerius heard the rest and did not care. That single fact wrote itself in his mind, repeating. He held his new sword too tightly. Ridges of half-formed metal gouged into the meat of his fingers. The tidal wave that rocked him was neither relief, nor anger, nor grief, but a mix of these, made ugly and unclean by the manner of the telling.
    Late in the chaos, he remembered that Luain mac Calma stood nearby and that there were fictions he still wished to preserve.
    He said, ‘You forget what I have been. If the Eceni lack weapons and the will to fight, it is because I have broken them. Knowing that, do you seriously wish me to weep for the fate of a