always stayed downwind. He still had a warrior's instincts, Cunovic thought, grooves like wheel ruts cut deep into his personality that told more about Nectovelin's past than all his boasts.
It always hurt Cunovic that this impressive man, his grandfather, seemed to think so little of him. 'You're wrong about me, you know,' he said. 'Maybe I didn't put my back into building the house, but the gifts I sent home helped pay for it, didn't they?'
Nectovelin hawked and spat. 'You talk like that bowel-creasing druidh. But words are as dust. Look at what you are! You wear a woollen tunic like your brother's, but your face is smooth, your hair brushed-even your nostrils and ears plucked, if I'm not mistaken. The house of your body shows what you aspire to be.'
Cunovic took a step closer to the old man, a deliberate challenge, and Nectovelin stiffened subtly. 'And you're a hypocrite,' Cunovic said softly. 'I don't recall you turning down my silver brooches and my amphorae of wine, with which only yesterday you bought five head of cattle from Macha, that other old curmudgeon from the valley. You may not like it, grandfather. It may not be like the old days. But this is the way the world works now.'
Nectovelin glared back, as still as a wolf, his face a mask pooled with shadows.
Ban came to their rescue. He stood between brother and grandfather. 'Not tonight, lads. I've got enough to deal with.'
Nectovelin kept up his unblinking stare a heartbeat more, and Cunovic was willing to be the one to look away first. The three of them moved apart, and the tension eased.
In awkward silence the three of them turned to face the house. One of a dozen surrounded by a straggling ditch, in the dark its conical profile was low, almost shapeless. But you had to understand the detail. Its big support posts came from trees marked out for their purpose since they were saplings, so securely fixed and well balanced that no central prop was needed. That big open inner space was set out, according to ancient custom, to reflect the cycles of days and seasons. The single doorway faced south-east, towards the rising sun at the equinox. As you walked around the house, following the track of the sunlight through the day, you passed from the morning side of the house to the left, where children played, cloth was woven and grain was ground, to the night side, where food was prepared and people slept. Even now Brica lay on her hide pallet just to the left of the doorway, for this was the place of birth, while the oldest of her grandmothers sat at the right of the door, ready to walk out into the deeper cold of death.
In Cunovic's experience, stuck-up southern types trying to ape the Romans imagined that such houses were nothing but great middens, heaped up by men with minds like children. They were quite wrong. Brigantians could build any shape they liked. Most of their barns and grain stores were rectangular, for convenience, and sometimes they built of stone, just like the Romans. But they preferred to build their homes round and of living wood, to reflect their minds, the cycles of their lives, and their embedded goddess.
All this swirled around in Cunovic's head. He was proud of his house and his contribution to it: a Brigantian house of the old style, partly paid for with new money. This place was where he came from; he would always be Brigantian.
But as a trader of dogs, horses and leather he had to deal not just with thuggish southern kings but with sophisticates from the Mediterranean, the very heart of the huge and mysterious Roman world. He'd had to learn to be a different way. Nectovelin's was a world of family and loyalty into which you were tied with bonds of iron, from birth to death. Cunovic moved in a much looser world, a world where he could do anything he liked, as long as he made money at it. He had learned to cope with this. But before proud old men like his grandfather, he sometimes felt as if he was being torn in two.
The door flap rustled heavily, leaking a little more torch light, and Cunovic could hear Brica's screams and the obsessive chanting of the druidh.
Ban stamped on the ground, jerky, restless. 'It's going badly. It's been too long.'
'You don't know that,' Cunovic said. 'Leave it to the women.'
Nectovelin growled, 'Maybe it's the prattling of that priest. Who could concentrate with that yammering in your ear, even on pushing out a pup?'
When Cunovic had been a boy the priests were there to advise you on the cycle of the seasons, or on diseases of cattle or wheat-all lore passed down through generations, lore it was said it took a novice no less than twenty years of his life to memorise on Mona. In recent years things had changed. Cunovic had heard that the Romans were expelling the priesthood from Gaul, declaring it a conspiracy against the interests of their empire. So the priests went around stirring up feelings against the Romans. Besides, Nectovelin always said that the druidh with their foreign notions only served to come between the people and their gods. Who needed a priest when the goddess was visible in the landscape all around you?
But Cunovic couldn't resist teasing the old man. 'If he's in the way, grandfather, throw him out. It's your house.'
'You can't do that,' Ban said hastily. 'It's said you'll be cursed if you throw out a druidh.'
'Whether it's true or not,' Nectovelin said, 'enough people believe it to cause upset. Don't worry, grandson. We'll stomach the priest as we stomach that Roman piss-wine your brother brings home. And we'll get on with what's important-caring for your boy.' His scarred face was creased by a grudging smile. 'Brica told me you're planning to call him after me.'
'Well, you're seventy years old to the day, grandfather. What other choice could there be?'
'Then let's hope he grows up like me-strong, and with the chance to break a few of those big Roman noses, for I know he is born to fight.'
Cunovic said, 'And if it's a girl and she's anything like you, Nectovelin, she'll be even more terrifying.'
They laughed together.
Then Brica screamed, a noise that pierced the still night air. And she began to gabble, a high-pitched, rapid speech whose strangeness froze Cunovic's blood.
Ban cried out and ran back to the house. Cunovic ran with him, and Nectovelin lumbered after them both.
III
Inside the house Brica lay on her hide pallet. The circle of women, clearly exhausted themselves after the long labour, sat back, helpless.
The paleness of Brica's face contrasted vividly with the crimson splash between her legs, as if all her life force were draining away there. But Cunovic saw a small head, smeared with grey fluid and still misshapen from its passage through the birth canal. The baby, its body still inside Brica, was supported by the strong hand of Sula, its grandmother. Like its mother it looked very pale, and it had hair, a reddish thatch.
And Brica, her eyes fluttering as the druidh's had done as he prayed, was gabbling out that rapid speech. The women were distressed; some of them covered their ears to keep out the noise. Even the priest had stumbled back into the shadows of the house, his eyes wide.
Cunovic stared, entranced. The speech was indistinct and very fast, an ugly barking-but he could make out words, he was sure.
Sula, cradling her grandson's head, looked up at Ban in weary despair. 'Oh, Ban, the baby is weak, his heart flutters like a bird's, and still he won't come. She's growing too tired to push.' She had to speak up to make herself heard over Brica's noise.
'Then you must cut her,' Ban said.
'We were ready to,' Sula said. 'But then she started this chattering, and we can't think, none of us!'
Nectovelin growled. With two strides he closed on the druidh, grabbed a big handful of the priest's robe and hauled him close. 'You! Is this your doing? Are these curse words she utters?'
'No, no! On my mother's life!' The druidh was thin, pale, balding, perhaps forty, and he trembled in Nectovelin's huge grasp.
'Nectovelin!' Cunovic spoke sharply enough to make his grandfather turn. 'That will do no good. It's nothing to do with him. Let him be.'
'And how do you know that?'
'Because I recognise what she is saying. Those aren't the words of gods-not our gods, anyhow.'
