Dreaming the Eagle by Manda Scott Page B

coming to hand for their feed but had not yet known a bridle.
    The sense of her mother changed. On the platform beyond the fields at the edge of the forest, the bones of the dead bleached under the sun and grew grey under the rain. For a while, as the hawthorns shed their flowers, they lay under a fall of petalled snow and took on the colour around them. She visited still, but less often, and her nights were calmer. If her mother came at all, she brought peace and good memories, not pain.
    The world moved fast around them. In a birthing hut built inside the rampart, Nemma gave birth to a red-haired baby boy. Of those several youths who could have been the sire, Verulos pledged its rearing. He was lame in one foot and had failed his warrior’s tests but he was a good apprentice harness-maker and it was widely agreed that he would be a suitable father. Nemma was clearly content with the outcome.
    In the forge, the sword grew slowly from the dense, dark shaft to the blue iron of a forged blade. The metal worked well under the hammer. Eburovic sang over it as he had not sung all winter. Once, he asked Breaca for hair plucked from the sides of her head where it would be braided for battle, and another time for her nail parings. She gave him what he asked for and watched him build them into the start of the day’s fires, still singing. He did other things as well, things that she had not seen before, and the forge became a place of new explorations that drew her back daily and sang her to sleep at night.
    Elsewhere, Ban nursed his hound whelp. The small thing had become less small and found his legs. His eyes, which had been pale blue like the sky when they opened, had gone grey like her father’s and then brown like Macha’s and Ban’s. With longer legs and better vision, he progressed from chasing snails and slugs and beetles to herding the chickens and bothering the mares. Taller still, he learned that the roasting fires were worth watching and Camma, younger sister to Nemma, who tended them, found herself daily engaged in a challenge where the winner gained at least a portion of a meal and the loser might go hungry. She did not always win.
    The traders came with the change in the weather. Arosted was first; the slight, wiry salt trader who came up the tracks on the last of the snow, leading his train of splay-footed pack ponies with his son and his daughter and two of his half-cousins as helpers, hauliers and guardians. He laid out his bricks of salt, still crisp and dry from the kilns, in one of the barns and the bargaining began. In previous years, he had traded for weapons. This year, because the people of the Dobunni, in whose land the salt springs rose, had made peace with their southern neighbours, he took instead brooches and belt buckles from Eburovic, two sapling hounds bred by Macha from a promising young bitch, and a pair of doeskins which had been hunted by Sinochos and prepared by Nemma, whose dream was the red doe and who could turn out their skins softer than anyone.
    Besides salt, Arosted brought the first news of the outside world in the wake of winter, a service for which he was also well paid. As the flurry of trading subsided, he took Eburovic and Macha aside, conveying the news that the elders of the Coritani wished it to be known that they had cast out three of their younger warriors at the start of winter in retribution for a raid that went against the laws of gods and men. Most important, they wished it to be understood that they would never, in any circumstances, have sanctioned an attack on a woman in childbirth, particularly not a woman as honoured by the gods as was the late leader of the Eceni.
    When Macha suggested politely that it was not unknown for the elders of the Coritani to lie, Arosted showed them the armband in solid gold that he had been given to ensure the message was passed speedily and to the right ears. If they lied, they did not do so cheaply. Eburovic, in turn, gave him a bay