One of the huts, larger than the rest, had been fitted up as a kind of hostelry. A brazier burned in the middle of the floor, smoke curling upwards through a hole in the roof. A sturdy, yellow-haired boy appeared at Lance’s elbow and took Balana’s reins from him: dazedly he allowed this, then followed Drusus into the warmth.
Broad wooden benches surrounded the fire. They were covered in sheepskins that looked as though they’d been there since the hut was built, but were no less comfortable for that when Lance sat down. He hadn’t even meant to do that much: stiffened immediately and tried to get back up, but Drusus placed a large hand on his shoulder. “Rest,” he ordered. “Gaius would be angry to know you were driving yourself and the animals so hard. And he’s a general now, so you have to mind what he says.”
“A general?” Lance echoed in amusement. He sank his fingers into the sheepskin to keep a grip on reality, but all that served to do was plunge him back into memories of the firelit bedchamber at Vindolanda. “He’ll be a good one, I’m sure. What about Ector?”
“You have to sleep. Close your eyes, at any rate, while I fetch food.”
“All right. But then I have to move on.”
“Very well, very well.”
“What happened to him, Drusus?”
“To... To Ector?”
“No. To Arthur. Was his wound very bad?”
“No worse than he’s had before, but he took an infection after it. Still, you know how strong he is.”
“I should have been there with him. I should have gone the first damn time he asked.”
“You’ll be there soon enough.” Drusus gave him a shove, and Lance, who for all he burned and longed to be on horseback and flying north once more was still a lad of nineteen summers, at the mercy of his body’s demands, rolled down onto the bench, asleep before his head touched the sheepskin.
He had a strange dream. In it, he was the dragon who had come from the stars to rest in the moorland earth. He coiled his tail around Caer Lir in the west, and he laid his great head on the sands at Din Guardi.
No rest for him here, though. The people at his centre were hungry, the men and women of Vindolanda. He tried to curl himself protectively around them, but he was stretched too thin. He lost the sense of himself as male, slipped into a dark, blood-hot knowledge of his mother, of Viviana, the very land itself and the dragon-force within it. The dragon waited. She could feed everyone if she herself was fed, if the ancient contract of friendship and trust was fulfilled. If the women came to the cave...
But the women were gone. Starving, the dragon tried anyway. She rubbed her great snout around the fort at Din Guardi, causing panic and earth tremors there. She pressed one vast eye to the chamber where the future king lay dying, the magical weave of his ongoing life snapping thread by thread, falling into disarray. She’d have wept over him, and her tears would have washed away his fever and pain like the dust from a long weary day, but he was sealed away from her. She cried out his name, and the soldiers herded the women and children inside, barred the gates and dropped a portcullis of iron, a terrible new barricade through which she could not pass.
Fading and sick, the dragon retreated. She shrank as she coiled herself back into the earth. She became as an adder, then a tiny grass snake, and then she was nothing but a worm, her powers reduced to the small mindless ever-task of eating and turning the soil. When the hare appeared, the creature seemed vast, blocking out the sun. “Ah,” said the hare. “Which miracle do you need, child—the small one to stop you breaking your poor coils in two between your past and your future, or the great one concerning the sword from the stone?”
“Both. I need both, Viviana.”
A distant chuckle, the feel of a gnarled old hand on his hair. “Greedy boy! Well, well. We’ll see what we can do.”
Lance jolted awake. He couldn’t have slept long: there was a bowl of broth on the ground by the bench, still steaming. Half a loaf of bread, too, warm to his touch when he reached for it. Drusus, seated on the bench next to his, was tearing hungrily into the other half. He grunted as Lance sat up, silently gestured to him that he should eat.
He picked up the bowl. He was ravenous, dreams scattering to windblown rags. He dipped a wooden spoon into the bowl, and finally noticed the figure on the other side of the fire.
Just another traveller, resting from the road. He was hunched over his broth, and he too had stopped, spoon in hand, to stare at Lance. He was gaunt, long-limbed. Once he must have been handsome. His cloak was ordinary, but beneath it he wore the shabby remains of a Roman army uniform. He put back his hood, and Lance found himself staring into the face of his father.
Chapter Three
“Much I gained by running away from you. The emperor Constantinus was recruiting. I met one of his generals in the east, and he hired me, along with a shipload of other poor fools who could lift a sword and had reason to leave these shores. This island’s finished, as far as Rome is concerned.”
Ban still had a fine head of fair hair. The longer Lance stared at him, the more the years dropped away, and the more he struggled to fit the familiar face to the dead-leaf words falling from its mouth. “I didn’t even know there’dbeenan emperor Constantinus,” Lance said, and wondered at his own stupidity. His first words to his father in four years, and he sounded like a dolt.
Ban gave him a tiny smile, as if he’d read the thought. “You wouldn’t have. He was gone before news could have reached you here—the usurper usurped, by a puppet of the Vandals called Jovinus. You won’t have heard of him either.”
“No, I haven’t. What did you do?”
“I was on the Rhine when Jovinus made his move. Jovinus looked good for a while, so I deserted, along with a lot of the other troops.”
Noble King Ban, who would once have recoiled at the thought of such treachery! He wasn’t even seeking to defend himself. Lance, who was growing up in fits and starts, leaned his elbows on his knees and suddenly found he could lift away his memories of his father from the man sitting opposite him now. Ban had been noble because Lance, as a boy, had yearned for nobility, and had thrown that longing upon him. Believed all his stories, gazed in admiration at his army cloak and sword. He’d been a kindly, easygoing father, more concerned with hunting and carousing with his friends than heroic displays of courage. None had been demanded of him, until the night of the raid. “I take it,” Lance said flatly, “that Jovinus was defeated, too.”
“By the Visigoths. They put his head on a spike outside Ravenna. The Western Empire is crumbling, Lance. That’s why Rome’s jettisoned Britannia. They’re trying to protect their heartland, but I don’t think even that can last for long.”
