Dawn Wind (5 page)

‘My mother died when I was small,’ Owain said, levelly. ‘I should not even know what she looked like, but my father made an outline in charcoal once of her head shadow on the colonnade wall, and kept it safe with a bronze grill over it. She had a very little neck and a lot of hair piled up high.’

Priscilla had taken up her distaff loaded with lichen-dyed wool, and when she spoke again, her words sounded against the soft background thrumming of the spindle. ‘There’s good land down the valley foot, and Priscus would have enclosed some of it before this, if he had had a son to work it with him. We would have liked a son, he and I, but the Lord never sent us any child at all, and there’s no profit in questioning His ways. But the good land at the valley foot is still there, and there’s a son’s place empty by the hearth. If you have no one to go back to, you might do worse than bide here.’

Owain jerked up his head and stared at her. If the suggestion had come in a year’s time, he might even have considered it—at least to come back to, by and by—but his father’s death was still too near, so that the bare idea seemed like disloyalty. He shook his head. ‘I might do very much worse, I know that, Priscilla. You have been kind to me—so kind all this while—but I must go on to Viroconium. If any of our men came through the battle and gather again, they will gather there. There’s our own farm, too. I must see if anything is left of it. But first I must go to Viroconium.’

‘If any gathered to Viroconium, they will have gathered and gone again before this; you have lain sick a long time.’

‘Maybe the people of the city will be able to tell me where they are gone, so that I can follow.’

Priscilla teased out a few more strands of wool. ‘There will be—there will have been no gathering to Viroconium or anywhere else, you know that. Here in the Western Hills we may remain free, but for the rest of Britain, the thing is finished and the lights are out. What can you do against the Saxon hordes?’

‘Even Priscus wished that he was young again and had a sword.’

‘Priscus is a fool.’

‘So am I. I have no sword, but at least I am young. I must go, Priscilla.’

Silence hung between them, filled only with the thrum of the spindle. Then Priscilla broke it with a snort. ‘A child you are, and a fool you are, and so you must go,’ and was silent again so long that he thought she was angry. At last, quite suddenly, she laid aside spindle and distaff, and let her big hands drop into her lap. ‘There’s no more to be said. Go then, in the morning. But remember always that so long as my old Priscus and I are here, there’s a place here for you, if you need it.’

‘I will remember,’ Owain said. ‘And maybe I will come back one day, and maybe not. But either way, I will always remember.’

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morning, so early that the hillside was still in shadow, Owain set out again for Viroconium.

Priscilla had given him food and the household’s spare strike-a-light, and a good thick cloak, and Priscus had added three horse-hair snares and a good long hunting knife with a well-worn alderwood handle; and he had tried to thank them and failed completely, and whistled Dog to heel and come away. Now, as the rough hill track turned him over to the road that he had missed so long ago, he wished that he had kissed Priscilla at parting, because he thought that she would have liked it.

But already the past weeks were growing thin and distant to him. There were plenty of other things to fill his mind. In two days he struck the great double-track frontier road, and followed it northward, keeping it in sight, but not too closely, for there was no knowing how far west the Saxons might have thrust. Dog trotted at his heel or loped on wolf-like far ahead, looking round from time to time to make sure that he was coming. It was late summer now, turning to autumn, and there were no more birds’ eggs, but he had the barley-bannocks and strong ewe-milk cheese that Priscilla had given him, and when that was gone, he had his knife and his hound and his snares, and his strike-a-light to make a fire; and they lived on the country, hunting and foraging as they went.

For the same reason as he avoided the road, Owain kept clear of any place where men might be—and indeed the countryside seemed almost as empty of human life as the forests and marshes south of Glevum had been; and so in all that long trail north, he never heard of the Saxons, nor how things went with the rest of Britain.

He travelled slowly, as a man must who hunts as he goes, and it was many days later when the road that he had been following along the east side of a great moorland ridge brought him out into rolling wooded lowlands, and he saw ahead of him, so far off that it seemed to have been moulded from thickened blue air, the familiar wave-lift of the Virocon, which he had seen as long as he could remember from the open end of the courtyard at home.

That night he came down closer to the road, and found the place where Kyndylan’s war-host had encamped on their first night out. The blackened scars of their fires were still to be seen under the encroaching brambles, and he slept there with their ghosts for company, and at first light was on the road again.

The last day of his journey started bright, with puffs of white cloud sailing across a harebell sky. But as the day went on the cloud thickened, and when at last he came in sight of Viroconium, it was raining and the Virocon rising beyond the white walls of the town seemed to have turned inwards on itself and sit brooding darkly on ancient sorrows, in its fleece of wet woods; while the Sabrina curling southward into its gorge was grey as a sword-blade, sullen and without light.

Owain crossed the river by the paved ford, and squelched on up the last stretch of the road, his shoulders hunched and his chin driven down into the wet folds of his cloak.

The gravestones, which were always the first things one met outside a town, were each side of the road now. They were dark with rain, and the first fallen yellow leaves of the poplar trees lay wet against their feet. He passed the turf banks of the Amphitheatre, and then the double arch of the South Gate was before him, with the road leading through. There were no guards at the Gate. The walls looked much as usual save for a reddish stain spreading up one bastion that might have been the scar of fire; but as Owain, his chin still tucked down and the weary hound at his heels, trudged in through the archway and his padding footsteps turned hollow in the enclosed space, they sounded like footsteps in a house that is empty and hearth-cold.

He had passed two farms burnt out and deserted, that day. That should have warned him. But he had refused to understand what their blackened ruins meant; he had said to himself, ‘It was a chance raid, no more,’ and pushed on, with the dread that he would not look at thrust into the back of his mind.

There were no bodies piled within the Gate, no signs of a struggle that he could see. The townsfolk must have known that the Saxons were coming, and lacking their fighting men, fled in time. And the Barbarians, flooding into an empty town, had looted and burned to their fierce hearts’ delight. Owain wandered on down the straight street towards the Forum, aimlessly, because he had got to the place he was making for and found it dead, and there was nowhere else to go. And as he drifted along, he looked about him.

Viroconium had been half empty when he came that way before. It had been falling into decay for a hundred years, becoming slowly sleepier and more unkempt, the grass and the little dusty shepherd’s purse creeping further out from the sides of the streets. But there had still been life in Viroconium when Kyndylan’s war-host had gathered in the spring; voices and footsteps in the streets, and children playing on doorsteps, and smells of cooking towards evening. Now, the city was dead. The streets were silent, and the houses stood up gaunt and gutted, with blind eyes and blackened roof-beams fallen in.

Owain found himself at the Forum Gate, with its proud inscription to the Emperor Hadrian, and halted there, staring dazedly about him, while Dog stood watching him expectantly and wagging his tail. It was growing dusk, and he thought suddenly—it was a thought that made the sick laughter rise in his throat—that he could sleep in the Basilica tonight, he could sleep in the Palace of Kyndylan the Fair, if he chose; he was free of all Viroconium. But the little low-browed shops in the Forum colonnade seemed to offer a deeper and darker refuge to crawl into. One or two near the Gate still had their roofs on them, and he turned to the nearest of these. It looked to have been a basket-maker’s shop; everything that could be of use to the marauders had been stripped from it, but a broken pigeon basket and a bundle of withies still lay in one corner. The light was going fast, and the back of the shop was already lost in the shadows of the rainy twilight.

Dog, who was tired of being wet, padded in and shook himself, scattering a shower of drops from his thick brindled hide. Owain followed, dragging himself like a sorely hurt animal into the darkest corner, and lay down with his sodden cloak still about him. He lay curled in on himself and pressed against the wall behind him, his knees drawn up and his head in his arms, as though he would have shrunk away into the shadows and ceased to exist altogether if he could. He had thought that he knew it was the end of all things, in the night after the battle, but he knew now he had never quite believed it; always, all the long road north and while he lay sick of his wound, he had clung to some desperate hope that he had not really looked at; the hope that if he could only get back to Viroconium where they had hosted in the spring, there would be something … somehow life would go on again. But there was nothing. Viroconium was dead. All the world he knew was dead and cold, and he understood for the first time—he had never quite believed that either, even though he had found their bodies—that he would never see his father and Ossian again.

Dog sat beside him, watching with ears pricked and head a little on one side, as though he wondered why his Lord made these distressful muffled noises, and why his shoulders jerked.

Later, when Owain had cried himself into stillness, Dog lay down beside him and licked his face; and the boy put his arm round the hound’s neck, feeling some kind of dim comfort in the warmth and living strength of it under the harsh hide. And sleep came for them both together.

Once in the night Dog roused, and Owain, woken by his movement, felt the hair lift on the hound’s neck as he raised his head growling softly, and looked towards the entrance of the shop. For a moment his own hair prickled on his nape, and his heart began to race. But nothing happened, and there was no sound save the rain on the roof.

Next time he woke it was full daylight; the rain had stopped and there were smeared gleams of light on the wet herring-bone bricks of the pavement. Dog was afoot already, and sniffing about the doorway and the Forum Gate, as though after whatever had been there in the night. Owain sat up, and drew his legs under him, and got slowly to his feet. He was so stiff and weary, that he felt as though he had been beaten, and for the first few moments he could hardly stand. He lurched across to the shop entrance, and stood propped weakly against the fire-scorched doorpost, looking out across the Forum. He did not know what he was going to do now, he had not thought beyond getting back to Viroconium. But meanwhile, his body knew that it must have food, and even before food, water. Dog was lapping the puddles that last night’s rain had left in the roadway, but it wasn’t easy for a human to do that, Owain knew, for he had tried. There was a fountain in the centre of the Forum; it was dead like everything else, but when he went to look, the drain was choked with leaves, and there was a little rain water in the green-stained bowl. He managed to scoop some up in his cupped hands and drink before it all ran back between his fingers. ‘Food now,’ said his body, and he felt inside the breast of his tunic for the snares of springy plaited horsehair that Priscus had given him. Evening was the time to set a snare, but if he waited until then he could get nothing until tomorrow; if he set the snares now, there was a chance, though only a slim one, that there might be something in one of them by night, and if not, he had lost nothing. Anyway, he had nothing else to do.

It seemed a long way back to the South Gate, and he had not realized until now how footsore he was. Once he thought he heard footsteps behind him, very light and pattering, but when he looked round, there was no one there. The burial ground outside the walls had fallen into decay like the rest of Viroconium, long ago; saplings had sprung up between the graves, and here and there arched sprays of bramble and grey-bearded traveller’s-joy laced the tombstones together, and looking about him, Owain thought that it would be as good a place as any for his snares. It was not long before he found what he wanted, the hollow line of a hare’s run among the grass and brambles. While Dog stood by watching, he set his first snare at the foot of a stone to one Marcus Petronius of Vicenza, Standard Bearer to the 14th Legion, aged 39 years; and wondered, as he drew the crimson-leaved bramble sprays down to conceal his handiwork, if Marcus Petronius would have been angry or pleased, or cared at all, to know that one day somebody was going to set a snare for Lord Longears on his grave.