“What? No. But the wild things are beginning to die out in the open. A deer without a mark on her, just lying by the lough. We’d have brought her down with us, but the girl began to choke on the very air.”
They were both dressed for the rites, in long dark woollen robes. Sheepskin capes too, but none of it was doing Dara any good. She was doubled up, clutching her mother’s arm. Like most children of the settlement, she’d been hanging on by a thread, waiting for springtime, sunshine and good food. Lance took off his cloak. “Why did you go up?”
“Why does Father Tomas drag us to his miserable hut of a church in all weathers and winds?”
“Because he thinks his god gets angry and sends punishments. Is that what the dragon does too?”
Cerys looked disgusted. “Of course not. But she misses your mother. And she sees so little of the rest of us these days, she’s beginning to fear we’re dead.”
“She’s very nearly right.” Lance bundled Dara into the cloak. “Take her down. Tomas is bringing everyone into the praetorium overnight—look, I can see their lights. Go there.”
“What about you? Take back your cloak, stupid boy!”
“Make her breathe through the wool. I’m only going far enough to fetch that deer. We need meat.”
He watched them retreat down the hill. Then he turned to face north, where the Herdsman stretched out starry limbs across the sky. At the Herdsman’s foot, the star the Romans called Arcturus glowed like a tawny coal, comforting somehow amongst all the bitter diamonds. In his right hand the Herdsman bore an upturned crescent, hard to see against the shimmer of the full moon.Corona borealis, Tomas had called it: the crown of the north, but Elena had said it was a cup, a cauldron of rich, hot broth you could lift to your mouth, drink deeply and survive...
Lance’s head spun. His empty belly clenched so hard that pain rang through him like a bell. He could move faster without the cloak, which had never been his anyway. He set out for the line of the great Wall.
This had always been his favourite route. He had often pursued it alone, through the fort’s north gate and down the treacherous cliff-face steps to the burn. The stream’s course had worn, over unimaginable time, a V-shaped gap in the ridge Elena called the Dragon’s Spine, the tilted outcrop of black, enduring rock where the emperor Hadrian had set up and held his frontier. Holes in their natural barricade had not pleased the Romans, but the stream supplied water for all the fort’s needs, and they had straddled it with a turreted tower built into the line of the Wall. This, too, was falling into disrepair, or being aided to it by Picts and villagers in need of stone for their sheep enclosures. Lance had always found it easy to scramble under its archway and into the moorland beyond. He did so now, forgetting his weariness and pain.
He had never understood the differences he felt when he entered the world to the north side of the ridge. He knew that the great spine of rock demarcated a border between nations, between his father’s still-civilised world and the wild wastes where his mother’s people held their hilltop fastnesses against Pictish savages who painted themselves blue, or were born that way, depending on which story Elena had been telling. There was more to it, though, than the dangerous thrill of entering foreign territory. It felt to Lance as though the very ground beneath his feet had come from a different place, a different source in the earth. And when he would press on, during wild, sweet summer afternoons, northwards through the marshy reed-beds and heathers, the first thing he would come to was a magical lake.
The lough was no more mysterious than any of the others scattered around the line of the ridge. But when he broached the last rise of land and saw its waters laid out before him, the halo of golden broom that fringed its shores, he would always lose his breath. His heart would tighten with the awe Father Tomas told him he should experience only in front of the cross in the Vindolanda church, and often he’d find himself running, as if to an appointed meeting with a friend. He never saw the waters the same colour twice, and the mists that rose from them would sometimes weave themselves into dragons and serpents while he crouched among the reeds.
Tonight it was a frozen waste beneath a beaten-metal sky. Lance approached in silence. At the water’s edge he found Cerys’s deer, not too starved to be of use, but frozen fast amongst the stones and broken stems.
He tried to pick it up. The creature was two thirds his size but he’d normally have managed the heft. Instead he dropped to his knees, and then his belly, and lay flat.
He kept his face out of the broken ice by a bare finger’s breadth. Fear seeped out of him along with the last of his strength. He’d come and lain here so often—still as a hunting newt, as a wildcat—that he lost in an instant the sense of his own self as separate from these creatures, as separate from mud and lake and sky. His margins were blurred into those of the world: existence began to mean less to him than it would have to a stone.
At the last breath, loneliness seized him. He flinched in surprise: how could any of that be left? His mother, his father, the pack of siblings in which he’d unthinkingly grown up, companions for his every hour—all had been gouged away from him. This was different. Lance, dying on the shore of Broomlee Lough, suddenly wanted a friend.
I’m on my way, Prince of Nowhere.
Lance jerked his head up. The voice had rung out like sunshine, rich and rough, honey in an earthenware cup. He stared around him, coughing mud and ice out of his airway. His last breath became another and another. “Who’s there?”
No-one, of course. He was alone in the moonlight. Only one thing had changed, and that was the line of the eastern hill. A frozen deer was one thing, a far-distant promise of food if he survived. A hare—warm and real, almost within one good throw of King Ban’s spear—was another thing entirely. He needed her to come closer. He forced his raw gasps to silence, and he waited.
The brown hare waited, too. She had made a mistake, a leveret’s error, allowing her silhouette to broach the hunter’s horizon. She knew she was outlined against the sky.
Stillness was her ally even now. He might not have noticed her, dark as she was against the silver clouds. Inside herself she shifted shape, dissolved and coalesced into a tussock of grass, a rock.
No. This was Elena’s boy, a little scrap of dragon-skin himself, and not to be deceived by her alterations, her rippling and blurring. He should have been dead, and would be if he didn’t eat soon, but she felt the stubborn force of cohesion that burned deep inside him. The spear flashed. He made his move.
Spring and run. They were one, the boy and the hare, in the first instant of the chase: he was upright and off as quick as she. Then they ran and ran.
***
She was exhausted. How had she failed to shake off her pursuer? He had no dog, and when his first cast with his wooden spear had missed, he should have given up. Nothing on two legs could challenge the pace of the hare. And yet, whenever she slowed, over the thrum of her heart she heard him, feet light on the turf, drawing ever closer. He had coursed her from the lough almost all the way to the base of the cliffs on the north side of the ridge. They shot up, black and threatening, cutting off the moor. Her game was up. She released it with reluctance. The hare-form ate little: could thrive, it seemed, on freezing fog and moss. It had been useful. Now there would be pain.
Lance dropped to a panting halt in the cliff shadows. He could barely remember why he’d been running. It made no sense to have chased so skinny a creature this far—even caught, cooked and eaten, it wouldn’t repay him the energy he’d expended. He glanced around hopelessly. The moor was empty, not a flicker of movement from the black crags to the places where the horizon melted coldly into sky.
Shivering, he picked his way through frozen tussocks towards the foot of the cliff. Something—an angle of the moonlight, maybe—had thrown into sudden view the entrance to a cave. He stumbled in blindly, past caring if a wolf-pack had claimed it first.
The cave wasn’t deep. Its earth floor was dry. As well as his meal, Lance had lost all chance of getting back to the village tonight. Dropping onto his backside, drawing his knees to his chest, he decided not to care that he’d probably die before morning. There were other things to think about: that voice, the sound of sunlight, still resounding in the chambers of his skull, and…
And the paintings. There were outlines on the cave’s far wall, vivid in the moonlight.
