opposite, her head bowed, as if she were sleeping. Her hands rested tranquilly upon her knees, and they were the smooth, soft, delicate hands of a young girl.
He snatched a torch from the wall, and turned and ran back along the passageway to the upper air.
There was bright sunlight in the glade, and Orestes lay sleeping as peacefully as a little child. Attila shook him and he rubbed his eyes and stared around. When he remembered, a shadow passed over his face, but no more.
He said to Attila, ‘Your face is a right mess. You need a wash.’
Attila looked away.
‘Is she… Has she gone? And the voices?’
Attila nodded. ‘They’ve gone.’
Orestes tore up some grass. ‘What did you hear from them?’
‘Everything. And nothing.’
Orestes got to his feet.
Attila said, ‘We should move on.’
As the two boys walked down the valley in the bright winter sunlight, the voices came to them again, sighing through the trembling aspen leaves by the dark and silent river.
‘We are the Music Makers,
And we are the Dreamers of Dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.’
The boys said nothing to each other, as if neither of them had heard. They bowed their heads and walked on.
At last they ascended out of the haunted valley, and began to climb a steep, rocky slope, into the high mountain passes. The slope caught the full force of the winter sun, and was hot even at this time of year, the air rising off the rocks and into the deep blue sky above. Attila paused for breath and gazed into the Eternal Blue Sky, the home of Astur his father. And there hung a lammergeier: lamb-stealer, bone-breaker, greatest of all the European vultures, almost motionless on the thermals that arose from the sun-heated mountainside. His great wings outspread twelve feet or more, and his head turned slightly from side to side as he surveyed the world beneath him with his bright, fierce, fearless, all-conquering eyes. That god of the sky. That god-made Lord of the World, from the rising to the setting of the sun.
O Little Father of Nothing…
‘Come on,’ called Orestes from ahead.
What did it all mean? What did the gods want? Other than to be entertained, perhaps, by the sorrows and deaths of men?
Attila lowered his gaze and looked ahead at his friend, and walked on.
14
On a gusty autumn day, Lucius led Tugha Ban ashore at Noviomagnus, and went to the customs house. A few minutes later he returned and paid the captain in full for his passage. The captain grunted, bit the coins and slipped them into his leather purse. He wished the horse-lover well. The horse-lover wished him likewise and vanished into the crowds on the quayside.
He rode west down to Dumnonia. The roads were still good, and he felt no fear of bandits. Here, on the far fringes beyond the empire, all seemed peaceful. Britain was returning to being no more than a fog-bound little island off the shoulder of Europe, forgotten and at peace. Lucius grinned to himself. It suited him well.
The weather was mellow and there was soft autumn sunlight on the brambles and gleaming on the ripe clusters of blackberries and elderberries as he rode down the narrow lanes towards his own beloved valley, stretching down to the glittering silver sea. Tugha Ban whinnied with delight, and her flanks rippled and quivered, as she smelt the familiar earth where she had been foaled. The soft autumn wind whispered through the oakwoods and the hazel stands and answered her whinnying with its own wordless rapture.
At last he came to his long wooden house, and she appeared in the doorway in her plaid apron, and everything slipped from his grasp, every stern control and strong reserve. He practically fell from his horse, in most ungainly and unsoldierly fashion, and by the time he had found his feet she had flown across the farmyard, faster than it was possible for any woman to move. But her feet did not need to touch the ground. She flew like a homing swallow through the air. Then they were in each other’s arms, and it would have been impossible for even the strongest team of horses to pull them apart.
It was many long minutes before the sounds they made to each other made any sense or formed into words, and many of these were repetitive sounds, murmuring echoes: each other’s name, repeated over and over again, as if to confirm the miracle of their being there together; and the soft Celtic word ‘ cariad ’, whispered time and time again between their kisses.
‘Ciddwmtarth, cariad…’
‘Seirian, cariad…’
At last they stood back from each other, unable to let go of each other’s hands, but able at least to look into each other’s eyes without their own eyes blurring, or needing to cling to each other again.
Over her shoulder he saw a little girl with big dark eyes and a mop of dark curls, peeping out of the doorway shyly at him. It was Ailsa. He went to pick her up, but she ran from him. He laughed and turned back to Seirian, and froze to the spot. Her expression…
‘What is it?’ he demanded. And then ‘Where is Cadoc?’
She crumpled into his arms again, but this time there was no joy or peace in it at all.
They sat late into the night by the light of one flickering tallow candle, their hands entwined, and their hearts finding some comfort in the steady, childish breathing of Ailsa nearby in her wooden bunk.
The candle flickered dangerously, and they dreaded it. They dreaded it going out in front of them, and both prayed in their hearts that it should keep burning for ever. Seirian felt the guilt within her, weighing her down with a great grey weight inside. And Lucius felt repeated surges of red anger, which he shoved back down indignantly: ridiculous and shameful anger, as if his wife were somehow to blame for what had happened. They tried to talk, in stumbling, broken sentences.
‘I did write,’ he said, ‘but…’
‘The cursus is finished,’ she said. ‘Not even Isca gets letters now, they say.’
‘But you knew I’d come back.’
She nodded. ‘I always knew. I’d have known if anything had happened to you.’
He felt stung and angry afresh. Why had he not felt what had happened to Cadoc? But that was the difference between men and women, he thought. Women were linked by silver threads, more fine than spiders’ silk, to all those they truly loved. Men had no such threads; or if they had, the threads withered and fell away with
