Dreaming the Serpent Spear Read Online Free PDF

when it should have been most filled with life. A river whispered into the gods’ pool and out again, leaving the surface undisturbed. Black as a hare’s eye, as flawless and pure, the water caught the moon and held it fast in a ring of trees so ancient, so clearly god-filled, they had resisted even the Roman axes in a land starved of wood.
    Slowly, carefully, Breaca laid her part-carved hawthorn branch on the grass. The hairs on her arms stood erect, pulling gooseflesh in their wake.
    “Should we leave?” she asked. “I think I can find a quicker way back to where we left your pony, one that doesn’t take us past the pool.”
    Her daughter shook her head. “I don’t think we need to do that. Come and look at the carving.”
    Graine’s fingernails were black. Moss lay in broken handfuls on the turf. The stone that had held it was gritty with mud and earth, smeared into arcs where a small hand had tried to scrub it clear and had instead forced the loam into the depths of the markings so that the shape carved on it stood out as if newly painted.
    There, facing Breaca in the middle of the gods’ wood, was the symbol that had followed her from childhood through all the disparate parts of her adulthood, as Warrior of Mona, as the Boudica, co-leader of the western tribes with Caradoc, as Breaca of Mona and, later, of the Eceni, as Breaca, mother to her children, as the Boudica, un-leader of a gathering war host. Through all of these the serpent-spear had been her mark. It came to her again now, on a moss-covered stone, in a form that was entirely new.
    Kneeling, she traced a finger along its lines. A two-headed serpent looped back on itself, staring to past and future. A crooked spear lay angled across, joining the gods to the earth. Beyond it, the twin-headed serpent and the spear that crossed it were encircled by the most ancient of the gods’ marks: a zigzag line with moon dots above and below that staked a claim to this one sign and made it far more than simply the mark of a god-gifted warrior, or even the dream of an ancestor, however ancient and wise.
    Hoarsely, Breaca said, “This is Briga’s. The mark and the altar, both.”
    She sat back on her heels. Pain and the crossing of rivers was forgotten. Her hawthorn stake lay untouched by her side. For years, she had believed the mark her own, a gift of the elder grandmother, and had painted it on her shield and on her horses in battle so that it had become one with the Boudica’s name. Only later, in the year of Graine’s birth, had she found that it had belonged to the ancestor-dreamer long before that.
    It should have come as no surprise that, before all the others, it had belonged to Briga, mother to all the gods, holder of life and death, god of battles, of childbirth, of thesmith’s craft, of poetry; the god who lived as the serpent did, on the cusp of life and death, bringing one into the other, as the spear did in battle, as the serpent did, easing from one skin to the next, and one life to the next, leaving the ghost-shape of the old behind.
    As a warrior, as a mother, as a smith, Breaca had lived her life in Briga’s care. Even so, she had not expected to be so closely bound; a dreamer might be so, but she was not that.
    She hissed air through her teeth. “We should leave.”
    “No.” Graine came round to sit beside her, taking her hand. “Valerius has trained on Mona with Luain mac Calma and spent his long-nights in the dreaming chambers of Hibernia; he will have known what this was and he didn’t think it was unsafe when he needed a place to hide your blade. I think you should lift the stone.”
    The carved end of the hawthorn stake lay greenly white in the moonlight. Breaca jammed it under the long edge of the stone and used the hilt of her knife laid on the earth as a lever. Resisting at first and then easier, Briga’s altar stone rose from the earth.
    Mother and daughter worked together to free it. Graine stood on the end of the stake and