Dreaming the Hound Read Free Page A

of the camp, her voice filled his head. She sounded breathless and disjointed and he was unable to tell if it was pain that afflicted her, or an overwhelming need to laugh.
    ‘Go home,’ she said again. ‘The journey to Rome is faster in death, I promise you, and the land is warmer. Why stay here in the rain where you’re not welcome? The legion no longer owns you when you’re dead. You can go where you want.’
    The thought had occurred to Vindex more than once in life. In death, joyfully, he understood himself free. Passing through the walls of the officers’ tent and the insubstantial matter of his centurion, he began the not-so-long journey back to Rome.
    At the place where he had been, three more men of his watch died in a hail of black-painted river pebbles. The armourer was the last of them.
     
    I AUTUMN AD 57.
    I.
    THE WATER WAS COLD, AND MADE BROWN BY PEAT AND RECENT rain.
    Breaca of Mona, known to all but her family and closest friends as the Boudica, leader of armies and bringer of victory, knelt alone at the side of a mountain stream and washed her face, hands and the bleeding wound on her upper arm in the torrent. The water ran briefly pink where she had been. She cupped clean water in both palms, rinsed her mouth and spat out the iron aftertaste of blood.
    A blue roan mare dozed in the shelter of a nearby beech thicket, the end result of a lifetime’s breeding and better than anything
    Rome could offer. She was haltered but not tethered and came to call, her feet bound in soft leather to dampen the sound of her progress. Mounted, Breaca travelled north and a little east, moving up into the mountains, keeping to rocky trails where Coritani trackers, paid by Rome, would be least likely to find signs of her passing.
    If she had scaled the peaks, she could have looked west past further mountains and across the straits to Mona, but she did not. The standard-bearer’s warning echoed, disturbingly, with the muted footfalls of her mare and would not be made silent. You will never win, fighting as one against many. Vindex was not the first to have warned her of the dangers and futility of fighting alone, or even the second, but he was the enemy and she did not have to trust his opinion.
    It was harder to ignore the warnings of those who cared for her; the elders and dreamers of Mona, who watched over her children through her long winter absences, and could not tell them where their mother was or if she had died yet, at the hand of a standard bearer who was not quite as drunk as he might have looked.
    Luain mac Calma, the Elder of Mona, had been first, quietly, to say that the Boudica’s life was worth more, and vengeance for one man’s life worth less, and he had been followed by a succession of others who claimed to love her and hold her best interests at heart. Only Airmid, dreamer and soul-friend, had always understood why Breaca needed to hunt alone as she did and had never spoken out, openly or in private, against the black feather braided into the Boudica’s hair and the winter killings that it foreshadowed.
    Airmid was on Mona and Mona was another world and Breaca chose not to look at it and thereby not to think about it, or its people.
    She passed upwards, and the track became rockier. Grey stone lined either side of the tracks, marbled by swirling lichens. She dismounted after a while and unbound the mare’s feet, that they might grip better on the wet stones. The rain became less; it had belonged to the night. Clouds on the eastern horizon parted to show the first knife lines of light. Lacking any binding, the wound in her arm slowly ceased to bleed and ached only a little. The officer whose spear had caught her had kept his weapons scrupulously clean, for which she was grateful.
    Half a day’s ride to the south, at the overnight campsite where a standard-bearer, an armourer and two junior officers of the XXth legion had died, a wisp of greased smoke rose at an angle to the sky. Crows roused and