“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because here you are, with a squire and two good horses, if the beasts I saw in the stables are yours. If you mean to try your fortune in the service of Rome, I caution you against it.” In the silence that followed, Ban examined his son’s face. He gave a dry chuckle. “You never could keep your heart out of your eyes, boy. Look at you, wondering what right I have to caution or command you, and too polite to open your mouth.”
“I am not too polite. You’re a stranger to me, and there’s no point, that’s all.”
Ban didn’t try to hide a flinch. “I wonder, would it help you to know how I paid for my sins? I spent three years fighting my way home across the Rhineland and Gaul. I was a soldier for hire to whichever tribe of Vandals, Franks or Visigoths would pay my wage. I laid my head in marshland villages infested with cholera, and at the end of it all I barely had the price of my food and the boat when I got back to Gaul’s northern shore.”
“And now what?”
“Now, after my travels, I hope to go home.”
“Home’s a heap of ash on the moors, for all you know.”
“No. Not for all I know. News of the rise and fall of emperors might not have reached you here, but I met a soldier in the marshes who’d travelled from Caer Lir. From him I learned that Vindolanda was still standing, thanks to a fine son of mine.” Ban held out a placating hand. “I don’t think to flatter my way to forgiveness, boy. I’m only curious. You stood by the place for all this time. Why are you leaving now?”
“To join Arthur Pendragon at Din Guardi fort.”
Ban’s eyebrows flew up. “Artorius?”
“You’ve heard of him?”
“Everyone’s heard of him by now. Old Uther’s dead. Artorius seized the crown from his claimant half-brothers last year and made a great march north, drumming up troops for his campaign against the Saxons. He’s to be married, too, I hear, so there’s great doings in hand. You’re a grand boy, Lance, a hundred times the man I’ll ever be—but what would the king want with you?”
Lance put his bowl down so Ban wouldn’t see the tremor in his hands. His last letter from Art—the worn, much-folded parchment folded in his jerkin’s inner pocket, as close to his heart as he could carry it—was more than a year old. He glanced up at Drusus, but the messenger’s face was impassive. With swift, subtle instinct, Lance understood that he mustn’t spread word of Art’s illness, that such news would reach his enemies like the scent of blood. “I’m not sure,” he said—and it was suddenly, painfully true. “Possibly he’ll want nothing. But I owe him my allegiance, and I’m going to him.” He turned to Drusus again. “Now.”
Ban held out a hand. “A moment, son.”
“I owe you no moments.”
“Agreed. It’s I who owe you. I have my cloak, and the shirt on my back, and you wouldn’t want either. But I was a soldier once, and I do have something to give you. You’ll need it, if you’re off to fight the Saxons for the king.” A smile lit Ban’s face, erasing decades. “I recall you trying it on when you were five years old, and falling down the stairs under the weight. I thought your mother was going to kill me.”
Lance sat stiffly while Ban unfastened the pack at his side. Metal jingled, and Ban took out a chainmail shirt.Lorica squamata, the soldiers called it—tiny plates of bronze sewn onto a linen backing, in a Celtic design grown old before its adoption by the Romans. “I had a newer one,” Ban continued, shaking out the shirt so that its disks glimmered dully in the firelight, “but I traded it for food on the way home. You might’ve seen ’em. Bands of metal that go all the way around you, thelorica laminata. I’m not sure they do much better in a pinch than this old thing. Stopped a few spear-tips for me, anyway.”
He held out the garment. After a pause, Lance took it. “Won’t you need it,” he asked, his voice unsteady, “if you’re travelling west? The hills are still full of Picts.”
“Nothing ever changes, eh? No, I’ll be all right. And you can go to your king with an undivided heart, because I know you’ll have torn it in two to get this far.”
“Howdo you know?” Lance demanded fiercely. “I don’t understand. How did you come to be in this place of all others, at this very time?”
“It’s not so strange, is it? This is the only place to rest between the coast and Pons Aelius.” Ban tipped his bowl to his mouth to drain the rest of his broth. Then he sighed, and looked properly at his son. “I will tell you the truth. Your mother always said you were one of the dragon’s brood, even more than your sisters, and perhaps you won’t think I’m off my head. I had a dream in the early hours of this morning, when I was sleeping by a campfire three miles south of here. And in this dream an old woman spoke to me, and then...”
“Then she turned into a hare.”
“That’s right. May the gods of the Romans and the dragon’s cave forgive me for what I did at Vindolanda, Lance. I don’t know if they ever will. But I’m going back there now, to care for the place as best I can.”
Lance rubbed his eyes. What did Ban have left? Ten or twenty good years, he supposed. For all his trials, he was barely forty summers old. He was thin and wiry, much of his strength undiminished. Even stripped of his heart, he would make a good village chieftain, by rote and by habit... Yes, it would do. Lance could reconcile it to his conscience. His own heart leapt and started to race. Old angers and fears fell away. “I’m glad we met,” he said truthfully. “Can I help your journey onwards? I can pay for your horse’s feed and keep here.”
Ban pulled a rueful face. “And grateful she’d have been for that, if I hadn’t had to sell her, too.”
“Oh.” Lance pulled open the pouch at his belt. He took out the coins he’d have used to hire a mount for himself and ride on. “Take this, Father. A king shouldn’t have to return to his people on foot.”
Chapter Four
Lance would never forget his first sight of Din Guardi fort. In all the years that followed, rich with joy, blood and sorrow as they were, his memory never lost that shape on the horizon, the proud crest rising from the wild coastal flatlands, as he and Drusus left the Roman road and began their approach through the maze of Celtic lanes, lined with tangles of frosted hawthorn at this time of year. Hawthorn trackways, and then vast sweeps of heath, scattered with gorse thickets, a few dried-out blossoms holding on still. A confusing country, lonelier even than the Vindolanda moors, home only to the clean sea winds.
His instinct was to point Balana at the great rock in the distance and set her to a gallop. Drusus laid a restraining hand to his rein. “Wait a moment, sire.”
