My life in books

In Dreaming the Hound, the third volume of Manda Scott's Boudica quartet, the focus of the narrative returns to Breaca and her brother Ban, also known as Julius Valerius.

Breaca has returned to her own people, the Eceni, with her children Cunomar and Graine, and her step-daughter Cynfa. Now married to the Eceni leader Prasutogas, a client-king of Rome, she hides in plain sight from the Romans, who would gladly kill her if they ever connected the new queen of the Eceni with the war leader Boudica. Her goal is to build up an army of rebellion among the eastern tribes that have fallen under the sway of Roman authority.

Ban too has come home, in a sense, after several years spent avoiding both Romans and Britons on the island of Hibernia. In bringing a wounded young man he loves to the healers on Mona for help no one else can give, he finds in himself the desire to at last fulfill his gifts as a dreamer - and on Mona a dreamer willing to teach a former traitor how to dream.

But the Roman drive to control all of Britain continues. In the lands of the Eceni, the Roman governor authorises the work of slavers, who carry an offer to the Eceni king to relieve all the tribal debts in return for Graine and Cynfa. Breaca and Prasutogas' responses to this insult set in motion the path to the inevitable resumption of war against Rome. And in the West, governor Suetonius Paulinus marches toward Mona.

Again, Manda Scott weaves another chapter in this powerful historical fantasy series around the few facts known about the Roman treatment of the tribes of Britain and the uprising of the Iceni under Queen Boudica.

Dreaming the Eagle is the first of Manda Scott's historical fantasy quartet based on the life of Boudica, leader of the Iceni - one of several British tribes that rebelled against Rome in the early years after the Claudian conquest.

Very little is known about Boudica, or indeed about any of the inhabitants of Britain prior to the Roman conquest, and most of what is known, come to us through the eyes of the victorious Romans, who looked at the British tribes and saw barbarians. Thus the writer who choses to tell stories of this time has a great deal of free rein to tell whatever story she wants.

I label this series specifically as fantasy not just because so much of the lives of the Iceni and other tribes is - as it must be - invention, but also because the author's interpretation of pre-Roman British spirituality plays a large role, at least in the one book I've read so far.

In Dreaming the Eagle, Scott gives us an imaginative and engaging story of the young woman warrior who will grow up to be, not just the leader of the Iceni, but the Warrior of Mona, a title in some ways akin in meaning to battlechief of the Britons, given to her by the dreamers (Scott's version of the Druids) of the Isle of Mona. We also follow her half-brother Ban, captured and sold into slavery by a traitor of the tribe of the Trinovantes, who, believing all his kin including Boudica (here named Breaca for the early part of her life) killed in the ambush in which he was taken, has given his allegiance to the Romans who gave him back his freedom.

The book ends after the first major encounter between the invading Romans and the British defenders, led by Boudica and her lover Caradoc, leader of the Ordovices. The British forces have retreated, and when Ban discovers on the battlefield the bodies of some he believed dead for years, including that of his own mother, he starts to realise that he has been lied to. But the suvivors among his own people still believe him dead at the hands of the now dead traitor Amminios - brother to Caradoc.

I'm looking forward to the next volume.