That was the route Lance had taken in the bitter night, in a different world than this one, surely. He glanced up at the turret with a flicker of unease: his memories of Viviana and the moonlit lough were still too fresh for him to share the strange realm beyond the Wall with this new friend. Arthur sailed blithely past, however, only reining in when he reached the first crest of the road. “Look at that!” he cried, as if the sweet gape of the landscape beyond could somehow be new to Lance too, and somehow he made it so, with the flash of his smile and his broad, encompassing gesture. “The moors sweep from the tops of those escarpments like waves rushing onto the shore.”
Lance drew Balana to a halt at his side. “I’ve only once seen the sea,” he said breathlessly. “I travelled with my father to Caer Lir. It didn’t look much like that, though—quite flat and grey.”
“Ah, you should see Cerniw’s beaches. The rollers come in like thunder.”
“Are there many beaches there?”
“Dozens. Cerniw is nothing but coast—that, and strange circles of stone left by men who vanished so long ago, even the Druids have no name for them. Do you have those here?”
“Yes,” Lance said, oddly pleased to be able to give him something in return for the vision of the great waves. “In the far north, a circle that looks like arrows fired into the earth from the clouds. And nearer to here, within a day’s ride, four stones with little hollow cups in them. A fierce goblin’s supposed to sleep under those, guarding a wonderful treasure.” He paused, embarrassed. “A children’s tale. Father Tomas says he knows who made these things—your stones and mine.”
“Ah, of course. The devil.”
Balana gave a great snort. The sound and the timing of it cracked helpless laughter from Lance, and he let her surge onwards to hide his response. “I’ll take you to see the goblin stones. Other places too, if you have time.”
“Please. Ector says we should stay until the moon gets full again, if you can bear us. We’ll feed ourselves, of course.” Arthur drew level and held out a hand to silence Lance’s objection. “You really must accept this. It’s just what soldiers do.”
Lance shut his mouth.Soldiershad included him. As the son of a military man, the idea wasn’t new to him, but for a long time now he’d felt like anything but. The army Ban had served was long gone. Once the moon was full, he’d be nothing but a farmhand again, and had no right to be making a Roman charger dance and clatter on the sunny road, which might yet be treacherous with ice. He made the smallest sign to Balana, who dropped into a sober walk. “All right,” he said, sounding ungracious to himself. “I’m sorry. I mean that you and your people are truly welcome here, and I’m only ashamed that the vicus can’t support you.”
“Well, you’ve had a bad...” Arthur looked around him at the glittering, glorious day. “A bad winter. Why do you think the spring didn’t come?”
“Oh, our sins, no doubt. Tell me more about Cerniw, or the Forest Wild. I bet it’s never like this down there.”
“The winters in Cerniw are seldom severe. It’s a gentle land, if you don’t mind being knocked off your feet by the gales nine days out of ten. The forest, though, where I grew up... We were often snowbound there for months, though we never suffered hardship in Ector’s stronghold. And then there were the summers.”
The faint catch of yearning in his voice transferred itself to Lance, who yearned suddenly too. “I can’t imagine.”
“Think of a deep land, sheltered. None of your great barren stretches, bare rock and thin sheep-nibbled soil like this. Deep earth, and time for the trees to grow three times as tall as the praetor’s house.”
“Ah. Even the tallest birches here scarcely reach past my shoulder.”
“Think of stately oak and ash, miles and miles of it, unbroken but for sunshine, the meadow land of little farms, a few clearings where the deer and new fawns come to gather in the spring. It’s easy to get lost. You can wander for days on the mossy tracks and never meet another human soul.”
“You must love it there.”
“You know, as a child growing up, I didn’t. I didn’t reallyseeit. The glades, the tumbled rocks with half a dozen different kinds of ferns growing out from the cracks—all that was just the world. I see it now. Does that seem ungrateful, or strange?”
“To see with the mind what the eye has lost—to see properly then for the first time? No, not strange at all.”
They rode on in silence. For Lance, the quiet between them was fraught: he’d gone too far, surely. This visitor was perceptive, and would perhaps ask next what Lance had lost, and seen properly for the first time only when it was gone. “Why do they call you Bear?” he demanded abruptly to forestall him, and was relieved to hear him laugh. “That was my other question—the one you wouldn’t let me ask last night.”
“Because we were trading, and you hadn’t given me half enough. Still haven’t, for that matter. I’m willing to bet your village priest never dipped you in the font and named youLance.”
“No,” Lance agreed calmly. “I’m Tertius, just like most other Roman third sons. And I will explain, but...” He shielded his eyes and looked out across the gorse bushes, whose butter-gold flowers in the distance were being shaken by more than the wind. “You go first.”
“Very well. My Latin name’s Artorius, as you know. But I may have been... just a bit of a handful in my younger days, and Ector said it was like having a wild beast in the house, upending the furniture and rolling down the stairs. So, given my origins, he called me by the older word from my mother’s language, Art or Urt—a little bear.”
“I see,” Lance said, smiling. From habit he’d brought out with him Ban’s army spear, secured through a hoop on the saddle. “I’m sure you’re far too dignified and well behaved to deserve the name now.”
“Sometimes. Why? What did you have in mind?”
“Boar for your dinner, if you’d like it.” He unhitched the spear. “Come for the gallop, but keep well in the rear of me—he’s an old one, and mean. Gored a bairn to death two summers gone.”
“Wait. It’s your turn to tell me why they call you Lance.”
“I’m about to do that very thing.”
***
