Boudica: Dreaming the Hound by Manda Scott

Author:Manda Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Bantam Dell
Published: 2006-01-31T05:00:00+00:00

Valerius emerged into a night of no moon and few stars and it seemed to him bright.

Expecting death, or the slow beginnings of it, he scrambled with what dignity he could over the guard stone at the tunnel's entrance. On the way in, the light of mac Calma's fire had flooded the carvings on the surface of the boulder, sinking shadows into the spheres and circles etched by the ancestors. Now, there was nothing but warm winter wind and the silvered greys of a land that believed itself black.

The hound did not follow him out. He thought to call it and decided not; it was safer for it not to be caught up in whatever was coming. Putting his hands to his mouth, he sent his voice away from the dream mound.

“Hello?”

He felt foolish, more so when he was not answered. His flesh crawled and his hungry guts cramped but no one came; no waiting dreamers, no knives, no ropes to bind him down as they flayed the skin from his chest and opened his living belly to the crows. The turves had been relaid over the circle of mac Calma's fire. If Valerius had not sat before it for a night, awaiting the dawn to enter the chamber, he would not know where it had been.

The gods and the hound had abandoned him, but Valerius did not believe Luain mac Calma would leave before the end. Unwilling to be seen to search, he sat down on the guard stone to wait. After the intensity of the ancestors' chamber, there was a welcome peace in not thinking.

Presently, when still no one had come to kill him, he remembered the place where the wood was stored. Searching through a cavity in the dry southern side of the hill, he found tinder and a fire pot packed with old, dying embers. He was an officer in the auxiliary cavalry, or had been; he had built fires with less than this and been warmed by them.

Instinct drew him away from the hill, towards a swath of old oaks with a river winding through the centre. He had been a long time without water. In the dream place, it had not seemed important. In the presence of an unending stream of cold, clear water, thirst consumed him. He lay down and sank his face into it and drank for an eternity that stretched as long as the time he had spent in the ancestors' mound.

The cold steadied him and gave him purpose. He laid out the wood at a place where the river bent back on itself so that water surrounded three sides. His fire burned with small flames. By its light, he lay on the bank and slid his hands into the water and dribbled spit onto the surface to lure winter fish. They were few, but he was possessed of a patience that would have astonished those he had led, amongst whom the shortness of his temper had been legendary. At the blackest part of the night that comes before dawn, he caught a small trout and roasted it.

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