Lance stared. Once, long ago, he’d eaten a mushroom of the wrong sort, and except that mushrooms of any kind had vanished from the fields at the beginning of this eternal winter, he wondered if he could have done it again.
He could see horses. Not tall ones like those the Romans had brought: more akin to his own old pony, whose unquestioning, warm-breathed friendship he’d pushed far to the back of his mind after the famine had claimed her. Even smaller, though, by contrast with the stick-like human figures, their bellies round, black-tipped legs vigorous, bodies just here and there daubed with a vivid ochre.
There were cattle, too, some recognisable to him, and one vast ox, which surely must have been someone’s hungry fantasy. Even more bizarre, a fur-covered elephant, drifting as if through an unending dream, a little deeper into the shadows of the cave… Lance had heard of these beasts in the Roman books from which Father Tomas had tried to teach him Latin, had smiled at stories of the Carthaginian general who had gone into battle perched on the back of one. Reaching out frost-cracked fingertips, Lance touched the painting and smiled.
A little of the black pigmentation came off on his skin. Surprised, he eased back. It was just a few grains, but he didn’t want to damage the finely drawn thing. How had it survived, if it dissolved so easily?
He looked around. Something had changed in this ancient shelter, something recent. Perhaps a prevailing wind had altered, some shielding outcrop fallen. Yes, the wall was damp. The endless winter was reaching its erasing touch even into this last refuge. The next time some outcast found his way to the wrong side of the ridge, the paintings would be gone.
He wished it wasn’t so.
Then something scraped and moved in the depths of the cave, and Lance forgot everything in terror. He jolted back. His nerves were raw with starvation, and he stood for a moment in rigid silence, pressing his breath deep into his lungs. The scraping came again. The lights of pity and love which had briefly flared in his mind flickered out. He was a rigid knot of self-preservation once more.
There was just the outside chance that the sound could be his hare. Hunger sank its claws into his gut, so sharp that he couldn’t bear to remain still an instant longer, and he edged into the shadows of the cave.
Chapter Three
There was a bundle of rags, with sticks poking awkwardly out of it.
The bundle breathed. It twitched, issued a rasping cry, and used its sticks to try to scrabble away from him. The movement allowed him to distinguish a head, a frail skull patched with strands of dead-white hair.
It was a woman, or the skeletal remains of one. Once she was as far away from him as the confines of the cave would allow, she pushed herself up into a sitting position. Lance thought he heard the scrape of her spine on the rock. She was panting hard, as if she’d run and run, and the cracked black hole of her mouth was flecked with foam. Then, to Lance’s bemusement and horror, she began to grin, and after catching a few more wheezing breaths, she spoke.
“Well, boy? You’ve hounded me to earth. Don’t you have the nerve to finish me?”
Lance stared at her. The voice was surprisingly clear and strong, not the rasp her toothless mouth had threatened. “What?” he said, and his own sounded weaker—dry and thin with starvation. “I was chasing a hare. But I lost it.”
“Hah. Not for want of trying. Come on, what’s it to be? The knife? Or are you bold enough to snap my neck?”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Lance said, perplexed. “Who are you?”
She seemed to give it thought. She crouched herself together, drawing her knees to her chest. In the depth of her milky eyes, Lance saw a glimmer of amusement, and he dared a step closer to her, tugged by an indefinable curiosity. “I am,” she murmured, as if to herself, barely audible, drawing the boy a little closer still. “I am… thewitch!”
Lance leapt back. She had unfolded with a shout, arms and legs thrust out at him like spikes. He caught his heel on a stone, and landed with a thump on his back.
Immediately he scrambled up, tears of pain and fright stinging his eyes. Through their distorting veil he watched her resume her woodlouse curl against the wall. It took him a while to realise that she was wheezing with laughter. It shook her bony body like a storm. When she managed to draw breath, it exploded from her in a wild cackle that bounced off the walls of the cave and startled a handful of bats from their roost. Her eyes became slits and streamed with water.“Witch!” she rasped again, and rocked under another shrieking convulsion.
The word meant little to Lance. It was her movement that had scared him, triggering the reflex that would have saved him from a lunging boar or the strike of an adder.Witchwas a name Father Tomas used for any elderly woman of the village who had met with his disapproval.Send your children to me for their stories, my lord Ban, not to that old witch.Gathering himself together, he saw that she was still laughing at him, and for an instant considered finishing her off with a knife or a stone in very fact.
But the shock she had given him had shaken some frozen part of him loose. Whoever she was—whatever her odd sense of humour—she was a creature even weaker and poorer than himself. And Ban, although his concern for his children’s education had been patchy, had always insisted on one thing: you never raised your hand, nor if you could help it so much as your voice, to a woman, an elder or a child.You display them perfect courtesy, boy. Because I am a king, and you are my son.
The memory sent a thread of gold through Lance’s mind. It was the first link, between the father he had loved and the one who had deserted him by vanishing into death. Only when it was forged did Lance realise what an abyss of black rage it had crossed. He swallowed hard, and brushed dry earth off his clothes. “Ma’am,” he said. “My name is Lance. I am the son of Ban, the king of Vindolanda. If you are in want, I will help you, if I can.”
It took a few seconds, but the shrieking cackle stopped. Wiping her eyes, the old woman scrutinised him. “You will help me?” she said. “What willyoudo for me, prince of Vindolanda?”
Prince of Nowhere.The voice in his head had been a man’s, and young as green oaks in springtime. He’d have pointed out to her that now, in the wake of slaughter and grief, he was king, but he didn’t want to set her off laughing again. “Well,” he replied cautiously, “you do seem hungry. Maybe I can catch you something to eat.”
“Hmm. And maybe I’d let you, if you wouldn’t faint and die of the cold three steps outside of this cave.”
Lance opened his mouth to protest. But when he thought about setting off once more across the marsh, a weariness dropped on him, so massive and terrible that it sent him to his hands and knees, head spinning, a veil of red descending over his eyes.
“Here,” said the old woman, softly. “Here, child.”
She was sitting beside him. Lance couldn’t recall her leaving her spot by the cave wall, nor being aided to sit there himself. He watched, dizzy and passive, while she ferreted about in the folds of her torn black robes, and to his surprise, produced a handful of hazelnuts. Looking at them in her dirt-creased palm, he felt a wash of sickness: she smelled appalling, or one of them did. Either way, his manners pricked him again, and he said, weakly, “Thank you,” and took them from her hand.
She must have managed to roast them somewhere. They were dry, and crumbled deliciously in his mouth. His spit gave a long-starved squirt, and he put a hand to his lips in embarrassment. The old woman cackled softly at him, nodding her head back and forth. “There,” she said. “When you feel better, go and fetch me my supper.”
The hazelnuts did him a disproportionate amount of good. He sat for a little while in the light from the setting moon, feeling strength creep back into his limbs. Then he set out, spear in hand.
