Gunner Kelly

He looked around. “But you have made discoveries, so I have been told.”

“Oh yes.” The girl nodded. “They have a fair idea of the extent of the buildings, as far as the trees.”

“They’ve uncovered the edge of a pavement over there—” Audley pointed “—and it just may be an Orpheus one, too.” He watched Benedikt covertly as he spoke.

“An Orpheus pavement?” Benedikt obliged him quickly. “I have seen fragments of such a pavement not far from my home, near Munster-Sarmsheim, also discovered recently—not as large as your great pavement at Woodchester, of course . . .But there are many villas in the territories of the Treveri, so there is always hope.” He smiled at Audley. “I may see this find, perhaps?”

“I’m sorry—it’s been covered up again,” the girl apologised. “To protect it from the frost during the winter.”

“Ah yes!” He transferred the smile to her. “And I’m afraid our Fighting Man isn’t on view, either.” She shook her head sadly.

“They’ve taken him away for detailed study—they didn’t want to dummy1

risk leaving him, once they’d found him. Did your friend in London tell you about him?”

“Professor Handforth-Jones? Yes . . . that is, he spoke of a warrior.

I did not quite understand . . . but a warrior, yes.”

“We call him our Fighting Man.” She pointed to a larger area of excavation. “He was found there, in what may have been a barn.

They think he was a Saxon, judging by his equipment.”

“A burial?” He nodded. “It was the custom sometimes, was it not. . . of the Saxon invaders ... to bury dead persons in such ruins?” That was what Handforth-Jones had said, anyway.

“No.” She frowned for an instant. “I mean, it may have been their custom—I’m not a historian. But, what I mean is, they don’t think he was buried—deliberately buried.”

“It was pure luck, really,” said Audley. “They were digging one of their trial trenches, and they hit the remains of this chap straight away, under the fallen debris of the roof—and just the way he’d fallen, too—sword in hand— literally sword in hand.” He paused for a moment, staring not at Benedikt, but across the field towards the area of excavation which the girl had indicated. “Or . . . what remained of the sword and the hand, anyway . . . and everything else he died with, so they think— helmet of some sort, and a belt with a dagger, and maybe some sort of crude cuirass even . . .

Right, Becky?”

The girl nodded. “They’re not sure about that. They said it was much too early to be certain. But they did get very excited about him, and they were tremendously careful about lifting him out—in dummy1

the end they undercut him, and raised him in one piece . . . What they think—well, they don’t go as far as saying that they think it, but it’s one theory—is that the barn caught fire, and fell on him . . .

when the villa was sacked. Because they found evidence of fire, both there and in another trench, over on the other side.” She pointed. “And the way they thought it might have happened is that he was killed in the barn here, but in all the confusion no one saw that—or no one lived to tell the tale, anyway . . . And the barn caught fire, and fell down, but maybe it was empty, so no one picked over the ruins, like they would have done with the main buildings—or, it could have been at night that the villa was sacked . . . But they didn’t see what happened to him, one way or another, anyway. He just disappeared.”

“ ‘Missing, presumed killed in action’,” murmured Audley. “Or maybe even ‘AWOL’, as we used to record more uncharitably in some cases.”

“It’s how he was when they found him, you see,” explained the girl. “He had his arms flung out wide, with all his equipment and his sword still in his hand, like David says. And what Dr Johns says is that if his own side had buried him they might have left his weapons with him, but they’d have laid him out properly at the very least. But if his side had lost, then the other side would have stripped him—they wouldn’t have let perfectly good weapons go to waste.”

Benedikt looked around him. The gently sloping meadow betrayed no tell-tale signs of what lay beneath it, except where the trial excavations had been dug. It wasjust a field, with trees on three dummy1

sides of it, the roofs of Duntisbury Royal peeping through them on one side, bounded on the fourth by the churchyard wall and the tree-shaded church itself. And it looked as though it had been just a field since the beginning of time.

You must rebuild inyour imagination, was what Papa always said about sites such as this. But it required an immense effort of will to raise up a great mansion in this grassy emptiness—a house with colonnades, and many rooms, and gracious pavements on which Orpheus had tamed his wild beasts in the lamplight, where generations of people had lived.

And then one day . . . one night . . . this dream of a great house had turned into a nightmare, with the red flower of the raiders’ fires bursting out of the thatch of the out-buildings as the house died, signalling the end of civilisation—

But it probably hadn’t been anything like that, he disciplined himself: the end would more likely have come much more slowly and ignominiously, with the original owners of the Orpheus pavement long gone, and their uncouth inheritors squabbling in the decayed ruins with invaders who were almost indistinguishable from them, but more virile.

The bleakness of that conclusion roused him. Whatever way the Duntisbury Roman villa had gone down into the dark, it was of no importance to him.

He blinked at Audley through the thick lenses of the spectacles.

“That is a most interesting theory, Dr—Dr Audley.”

Audley smiled. “Not mine, Mr Wiesehofer. And not the most dummy1

interesting thing about the Fighting Man either, to my way of thinking.”