Dreaming the Serpent Spear Read Online Free PDF Page B

Breaca moved to the far side to pull up on the long edge, straining lacerated muscles against the dead weight until it rose past the point where the earth drew it downwards and she could set it on end, balanced against the heel of her hand.
    Underneath, a black cavity gaped. The air that leaked out was damp and earthen and sharp with the tang of forged iron. Graine lay prone on the earth and reached in as far as she dared, and came out with her hands full, and again, and again. One after the other, she drew out five long, slimbundles, each bound about with oiled linen and rolled birch bark and thongs made of red bull’s hide. She laid them out in a line across the turf. A smear of mud marked her temple, the kiss of the god.
    The closeness of the iron was dizzying, the smell of rust and raw metal and the songs of making and battle that were in it. Breaca leaned the altar stone against her knee and reached down to untie the bull’s hide thongs that bound the bundle that was hers. The oiled linen was not yet stiff or mildewed by its time in the earth. It curled away in her fingers, laying a hand’s breadth of bright iron open to the moon.
    She needed two hands free. She lowered the altar stone to the earth. With the same quality of care she would have shown Graine in infancy, she peeled the rest of the linen from the blade that her father had made; his gift for the child-become-woman who was his daughter.
    Eburovic had forged the iron and beaten it out over days, matching the length and weight to the woman she would be. Later, he had cast the serpent-spear in bronze for the pommel, knowing nothing more of it than that Breaca had seen the mark in the dreaming of her long-nights, and that it should be on her blade.
    The sword that Briga’s mark adorned was older than any of the Boudica’s children, or any of her loves except Airmid, who had always been first. Breaca had borne it in battle for almost twenty years until it became a part of her, as necessary as the muscle and sinew and bone of her body.
    It came to her hand like a live thing, keening. The scar on her palm itched and then burned and she welcomed the pain as she would have welcomed the soft bite of a lover;something sharp and familiar that promised more if she could meet and match it.
    She was not at all sure that she could. The passion that was missing from her healing was exactly the part of her that had once most yearned to fight. Even now, she feared knowing the full measure of what was lost.
    From her place by the altar stone, Graine said, “The gods answer certainty, not fear.”
    Breaca stood, letting her hand hang by her side with the weight of the blade drawing her arm down and out. She rolled her shoulders, loosening them. Then, under Nemain’s moon, beside an altar to Briga, who ruled battle and death, with only her daughter as witness, Breaca of the Eceni, bringer of victory to her people, set out to test the true limits of what she could do.
    Afterwards, she could not have said exactly when she became aware that more eyes than Graine’s were watching her, only that there had been a sense of emptiness that was the gods’ watching, which became less empty, so that she did what she could to stretch further, and sweep more cleanly, and pushed her breathing and her broken body beyond what she had already done.
    Even so, there came a time when it was necessary to stop. She made the last block and strike and counter-strike and let the blade’s tip fall slowly to touch the loamy earth.
    Facing the place where the less-emptiness waited, she said, “If I am not fit to lead the war host, will you do it in my place?”
    It had been a guess and a risk in the asking and there was a long, sweating wait before she was proved right.
    “It hasn’t come to that,” said her brother. “We have no need to discuss it.”
    Her brother, Valerius, officer of the Roman cavalry, who had once been Bán of the Eceni. Her last clear memory of him was from the ground, as he