Attila

14

On a gusty autumn day, Lucius led Tugha Ban ashore at Noviomagnus, and went to the customs house. A few minutes later he returned and paid the captain in full for his passage. The captain grunted, bit the coins and slipped them into his leather purse. He wished the horse-lover well. The horse-lover wished him likewise and vanished into the crowds on the quayside.

He rode west down to Dumnonia. The roads were still good, and he felt no fear of bandits. Here, on the far fringes beyond the empire, all seemed peaceful. Britain was returning to being no more than a fog-bound little island off the shoulder of Europe, forgotten and at peace. Lucius grinned to himself. It suited him well.

The weather was mellow and there was soft autumn sunlight on the brambles and gleaming on the ripe clusters of blackberries and elderberries as he rode down the narrow lanes towards his own beloved valley, stretching down to the glittering silver sea. Tugha Ban whinnied with delight, and her flanks rippled and quivered, as she smelt the familiar earth where she had been foaled. The soft autumn wind whispered through the oakwoods and the hazel stands and answered her whinnying with its own wordless rapture.

At last he came to his long wooden house, and she appeared in the doorway in her plaid apron, and everything slipped from his grasp, every stern control and strong reserve. He practically fell from his horse, in most ungainly and unsoldierly fashion, and by the time he had found his feet she had flown across the farmyard, faster than it was possible for any woman to move. But her feet did not need to touch the ground. She flew like a homing swallow through the air. Then they were in each other’s arms, and it would have been impossible for even the strongest team of horses to pull them apart.

It was many long minutes before the sounds they made to each other made any sense or formed into words, and many of these were repetitive sounds, murmuring echoes: each other’s name, repeated over and over again, as if to confirm the miracle of their being there together; and the soft Celtic word ‘ cariad ’, whispered time and time again between their kisses.

‘Ciddwmtarth, cariad…’

‘Seirian, cariad…’

At last they stood back from each other, unable to let go of each other’s hands, but able at least to look into each other’s eyes without their own eyes blurring, or needing to cling to each other again.

Over her shoulder he saw a little girl with big dark eyes and a mop of dark curls, peeping out of the doorway shyly at him. It was Ailsa. He went to pick her up, but she ran from him. He laughed and turned back to Seirian, and froze to the spot. Her expression…

‘What is it?’ he demanded. And then ‘Where is Cadoc?’

She crumpled into his arms again, but this time there was no joy or peace in it at all.

They sat late into the night by the light of one flickering tallow candle, their hands entwined, and their hearts finding some comfort in the steady, childish breathing of Ailsa nearby in her wooden bunk.

The candle flickered dangerously, and they dreaded it. They dreaded it going out in front of them, and both prayed in their hearts that it should keep burning for ever. Seirian felt the guilt within her, weighing her down with a great grey weight inside. And Lucius felt repeated surges of red anger, which he shoved back down indignantly: ridiculous and shameful anger, as if his wife were somehow to blame for what had happened. They tried to talk, in stumbling, broken sentences.

‘I did write,’ he said, ‘but…’

‘The cursus is finished,’ she said. ‘Not even Isca gets letters now, they say.’

‘But you knew I’d come back.’

She nodded. ‘I always knew. I’d have known if anything had happened to you.’

He felt stung and angry afresh. Why had he not felt what had happened to Cadoc? But that was the difference between men and women, he thought. Women were linked by silver threads, more fine than spiders’ silk, to all those they truly loved. Men had no such threads; or if they had, the threads withered and fell away with indifference; or men broke them irritably, feeling their responsible weight as something far heavier and more restrictive and punishing than the light gossamer silk that women felt. To women, those threads were as sweet a burden as a baby in the womb.

‘About two months ago,’ she said, ‘you were very ill. I trembled all night, and in the morning my back was covered in weals.’

He nodded. The night he had been beaten in the cells of the Imperial Palace. But he would tell her nothing of that. ‘I am well now,’ he said.

‘And will you go away again?’

‘I will have to go away again,’ he said.

She nodded and looked down and tears fell to her apron.

‘But at last I will be back,’ he said. ‘ We will be back.’

She nodded. ‘And we will wait for you both.’

They slept in each other’s arms all night, clinging together in silent desperation, and feeling the dark space between them that was their vanished son. An aching void which could not be ignored or filled.

Lucius arose before dawn and climbed the hill behind the cottage. Mercury, herald of the sun, hung like a tiny lamp in the eastern sky, and he knew that Britain was not simply a peaceful, isolated, fog-bound and forgotten island off the shoulder of Europe. For history and the world would keep breaking in; and there wasn’t a tribe in all the world, not even in the remotest mountains of Scythia, which did not know the weapons of war.

Tugha Ban stood peacefully asleep in the paddock behind the cottage, a grey ghost. Lucius felt an overwhelming sense of all the other lives that had been lived in this valley, all the other joys and tragedies of the families who had farmed this land and loved these hills and woods. And of all the people, all the parents and children to come, in the next hundreds and even thousands of years, with their new languages and their strange gods. His mind reeled at the thought. So many people, so many stories, and none of them would leave behind more than a scratch upon the earth of Dumnonia, a six-foot scratch in the rich red earth. And that, too, would soon be grown over and forgotten.

His mind came back to the present, and the all-consuming now that must be lived in and embraced for everything it was. Every moment was miraculous, a wise man had once said to him, no matter how terrible. Life itself was a miracle. The sun showed a gold rim over the horizon, its light coursing along the tops of the oak trees on the ridge like molten gold, and he raised his face to its distant heat and prayed for help. He prayed to the unknown rulers of the universe for help in this time of sorrow and direst need.

When help came, it came not as a radiant young god in a chariot of the sun, riding down from the heavens; nor as a white-robed goddess, stepping silently through the trees towards him in her golden sandals. It came in the form of a mere mortal: a battered old man in a moth-eaten Phrygian cap, who marched doggedly up over the crest of the hill from the north, with a twisted old yew-staff rapping along the flint-strewn chalk-track as he walked.

Lucius stared, his prayer barely out of his mouth. ‘It can’t be,’ he whispered.

The figure came closer. An old, old man with a long grey beard, but nevertheless walking vigorously now that he was on the downward slope, with long, rangy strides, as fitted his frame, which was a lean and sinewy six feet or more. Apart from the knobbly yew stick he clutched in his right hand, he went unarmed. But even his walk had an unmistakable stamp of authority and purpose. And then he raised up his face when still afar off, and Lucius thought he even saw the twinkle in those deep-set, hawk-like eyes.

‘Gamaliel,’ he whispered.

The old man saw Lucius and smiled. They clasped each other’s arms.

‘Lucius,’ said Gamaliel.

‘Old friend,’ said Lucius.

Gamaliel smiled, but Lucius was too overwrought to do more than stare, and cling.

Seirian appeared. The old man embraced her and kissed her, and held her back from him and gazed at her from under his bushy grey eyebrows.

‘Ah Seirian, Seirian, fair maid in a million,’ he sighed. ‘If only I were a few centuries younger…’

‘You leave my wife alone,’ said Lucius.

Gamaliel leant forwards and gave her another kiss on the cheek and then stood tall again. ‘I’m more than a little peckish,’ he said. ‘Do you have any oats simmering away? You know how I like my porridge.’

Seirian stoked up the fire in the hearth and set milk-and-water to simmer, stirring in fine oatmeal when it began to steam. They sat with steaming bowls of porridge on their laps, the porridge running with thick yellow cream, and ate in companionable silence. The winter birds twittered in the bare branches outside, hopping from twig to twig and coming down into the yard to peck for scattered meal.

Eventually they set their bowls aside, and Lucius and Seirian between them told Gamaliel as much as they could.

He nodded. ‘We will find him. We must.’

‘But how?’ asked Lucius. ‘Where do we begin?’

Gamaliel, typically, did not answer the question directly. ‘We begin where we begin. But we will find him. I feel it in my water.’ He looked especially grave. ‘I read it in the patterns of my porridge.’

Lucius couldn’t help grinning. Gamaliel the wise man, older than the green hills of Dumnonia. Gamaliel the hooded and cloaked wanderer of the wilderness, the great traveller and sea-voyager, who had been as far as the fabled Empire of China and back, so they said. Gamaliel, who had lived for a thousand years or more, and talked calmly and inscrutably of how he had known Julius Caesar, and how the great dictator used to cheat at draughts; or spoke of Socrates’ rather unpleasant personal habits, as if he had known him personally; and even of Alexander the Great, and how he had been his tutor, ‘and a far more useful one to him than that old Stagirian pedant Aristotle. Do you know, he once tried to persuade me that if a camel mated with a panther it would produce a giraffe? Preposterous!’

Gamaliel the story-teller, riddle-maker, joker, trickster, and holy fool, who wore his wisdom as lightly as his moth-eaten Phrygian cap.

‘Now then,’ said Gamaliel, settling back. ‘I believe you have the last of the Sybilline Books.’

Lucius gaped at him. He had almost forgotten the scrap of parchment that General Stilicho had given him. It seemed so long ago. ‘How in the Name of Light do you know that?’

‘I know everything,’ said Gamaliel mildly. ‘Well, almost everything. Everything that is worth knowing, at any rate. Unlike that logic-chopping, platitudinous dolt Aristotle of Stagira, with his ridiculous genera and his probabilistic enthymemes -’

‘Look, leave your dead Greek philosophers out of this, will you?’

Gamaiel harrumphed and crossed his arms. ‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘You do have the last of the leaves, I trust?’

Lucius nodded. ‘But what has this to do with finding my son?’

‘Everything,’ said Gamaliel. ‘Everything.’ He laid his hand on Seirian’s arm and said gently, ‘Now, my dearest, tell me everything that happened.’

She took a deep, brave breath and began.

She had been sitting on the beach with Ailsa, looking for seashells, when the Saxons came. Cadoc was out in his beloved little coracle, the tiny hazel frame covered with freshly tarred oxhide and rather grandly named the Seren Mar, the Star of the Sea. He was letting down freshly baited lines and hauling in mackerel, as obliviously happy as only a busy boy can be, when his mother shaded her eyes and looked to the clear horizon, and saw a square sail bellying in the southerly wind. She watched it for some time as it came closer, and when it was only a mile or two offshore and closing fast she saw that the device on the sail was no eagle, as she had thought, but a crudely stitched wolf in black.

In an instant she was on her feet with Ailsa in her arms, screaming to Cadoc to come in. In her desperation and terror, it seemed to her that the boy moved terribly slowly, reeling in his last line, looking back over his shoulder in some alarm, but not enough, never enough. The young never fear the world enough, and the old fear it too much.

Seirian had to make the most dreadful of choices: whether to take to the hills and the woods at once, hand in hand with Ailsa, or to stand and wait in agony while her eleven-year-old son rowed slowly in to shore, and to risk all three of them being captured, or worse. She chose to flee with Ailsa, praying to the gods that her sharp-witted son would make good his escape. She was halfway up the west cliff towards the dense hazelwoods when the Saxon pirates’ ship crashed onto the beach, its cruelly beaked prow cutting into the shingle as a sword would cut through the edge of a poor man’s shield.

Their first sport was to catch the young Celtic lad who was scrambling up the beach ahead of them, having stopped to tie his coracle to a keg-post in case of summer storms. How the Saxons laughed. They slashed the oxhide of the coracle into ribbons with their great longswords as they ran past, and they caught the boy at the top of the beach, knocked him to the ground with their cowhide shields, and shoved him headfirst into a hessian sack. They tied him up in the sack like a trussed fowl, and left him screaming there on the beach, while they roared on into the village to see what they could find.

They found a woman at a quern and her daughter salting fish nearby, and they raped them both, but they killed only the mother. They took the daughter with them, bleeding, bound and gagged. They killed a family in another longhouse up the valley, and slew all their cattle, but took one young heifer for meat aboard ship. They burnt a couple more houses, and a Christian chapel – they hated Christians and their pious houses. That done, rather disconsolately, with only a single noisy heifer and a couple of slaves to show for all that effort, they made their way back to the beach and pushed off into the small waves of the Celtic Sea, tacking eastwards for another raid further up the coast of the white cliffs.

When at last Seirian had finished, Gamaliel let go of her hand and stood up. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Seirian, my dearest, we should walk.’

Lucius stood up, too.

Gamaliel shook his head. ‘You stay here.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Lucius indignantly.

‘When we are gone,’ said Gamaliel, ‘take the last of the leaves, and learn everything that is there. Learn it all.’

‘Learn it?’ repeated Lucius. ‘What on earth for?’

‘For the sake of the future,’ said Gamaliel. Then he smiled, at his most infuriating and enigmatic, and chanted in a low, soft voice,

‘“For the time will come when the people will walk the fields like a setting dream,

And talk, as though the days were long, and the starlight deep.”’

Then he said more briskly, ‘After all, what was your father?’

‘You know what my father was,’ said Lucius. ‘A son of the druithynn.’

‘Then learning verses runs in your blood,’ said Gamaliel. ‘Your father could have recited ten thousand verses, without so much as a pause for a mouthful of mead.’

Lucius snorted.

‘Learn it well,’ said Gamaliel, ‘every word, without fail. Now I am going for a lovely long walk with your pretty wife.’ And they vanished out of the door.

Lucius heard Seirian giggle at one of Gamaliel’s jokes as they crossed the farmyard to the gate. It was the first time he had heard her giggle since his return.

Settling grumpily back on his stool, he pulled the tattered parchment from his leather wallet, and began to read.

Seirian and Gamaliel walked for a long time, down the valley to the sea, and along the fateful beach. Seirian drew to a halt and looked away across the grey sea, the cries of the wheeling gulls desolate in the autumn air. Gamaliel reached out his old hand and touched her bright young cheek.

‘Be comforted,’ he murmured.

She turned to him, a little scornful. ‘How can I be?’

‘Be comforted,’ he said again, more gently than ever. ‘“Content” I did not say.’

She looked out across the sea again. Then she turned and they walked on along the creaking shingle, up the west cliff into the woods, back along the ridge and down through the damp meadows. They spoke no more.

But that evening, by firelight, the three of them having eaten a good stew of lamb, hazelnuts and winter vegetables, they talked again.

‘You have learnt it all?’ demanded Gamaliel.

‘Here,’ said Lucius, handing the parchment wearily to his old friend. ‘Test me if you like.’

At which Gamaliel cried in a loud voice, ‘No! Do not offer them to me,’ and dashed the parchment away with a flying hand.

Lucius and Seirian looked at him in astonishment. It was rare to see him moved to anger.

‘But-’

‘They are not for me,’ said Gamaliel, a little more controlled. ‘You do not understand. Never show them to me. In fact…’ He stood up and, with a deft flick of his yew staff, twitched the parchment from Lucius’ hand into the fire.

‘What the-?’ cried Lucius, reaching out to retrieve it.

Gamaliel batted his arm down sharply with his staff, and ordered him to sit. ‘They are not needed now,’ he said simply.

They watched the ancient parchment curl up in the flames, the lettering flowing strangely in the heat, as if the words might somehow outlive the parchment they were written on. There was a faint odour of something… unhallowed, as if from the charnel-house or the grave, and the parchment was burnt and gone in a wisp of dense black smoke. Gamaliel plucked a bunch of wild marjoram from where it hung from a nail in the wall, and cast it onto the fire to freshen the air again.

‘What was that,’ asked Lucius, ‘the breath of the grave, and the black smoke?’

But Gamaliel did not answer. He only said, ‘You are the last of the leaves now.’ He smiled a little and said to Seirian, ‘Woman, behold your husband: the Last of the Sibylline Books.’ More gravely, he said to Lucius, ‘One day you will pass them on to your son, as was the Celtic custom with holy things of old. For you and Cadoc are of the line of Bran, and the blood of the druithynn runs in your veins, as you say.’

Lucius looked uncertain. ‘But you must tell me more, Gamaliel. I am all in a Kernow fog.’

The old man smiled, and gazed into the fire. ‘Alas, I am not so wise as you think. Mysteries are many, and none so mysterious as man. As regards the Sibyl’s prophecies… who can truly scry the future? Would the gods put such awful power into the feeble and treacherous hands of men? Is the future written in a book of heaven, unalterable and fated from the egg to the end? Do you not know in your heart that you can choose between the dark path and the Light?’

Seirian said to Lucius, ‘You know it.’

Lucius looked down, as if obscurely ashamed.

‘Then man has choice,’ Gamaliel continued, ‘and the future is unwritten, and prophecies are worthless doggerel. Even the parchment they’re written on isn’t fit for wiping an emperor’s arse!’

Lucius grinned. ‘Then why bother with them?’

‘Because men believe in prophecies. They hear their horoscopes avidly, they cling to their birth-stones and their mythical forebears and their little, little lies. Our systems have their day, they have their day and cease to be. But during that day they surely have their power, to hurt or to heal. Therein lies their power.’

Lucius nodded slowly.

‘The world is changed,’ said Gamaliel, ‘and we with it.’ He smiled at them with sadness. ‘And to this gentle land, and even to this valley, the Saxons are coming.’

Seirian spoke. ‘I know little of the Saxons. I know that their name means “the People of the Sword”. I never saw a sword drawn in quiet valley till that day. And I know that now my every dream of them is a dream of blood.’

‘That is how they want to be seen – and dreamt of, too,’ said Gamaliel. He went on, in a low chant: ‘Nine days and nine nights,

Lord Odin hung

Nailed to the world-tree,

A sacrifice to himself.

‘Then the sky cracked open,

The thunder spoke,

The dawn arose

And the longships set sail.

‘A sword-people, an axe-people,

An ice-age, a wolf-age,

And no quarter given

Between man and man.’

‘They are but one of many coming tribes,’ said Gamaliel. ‘Yes, they are a fierce and terrible people. In time, out of that fierceness something great and passionate may come, but now they are a People of the Sword, as you say, dear Seirian, and a People of Blood, and saxa is their word for their dreadful, biting longswords. They worship strange, dark gods, and the name of Christ is a torment to their ears. The sea is theirs, and in their narrow-beaked ships they traverse it by day and by night with a great hunger and with lust in their eyes. They laugh that they will sail across the uttermost ocean, to the mouth of Hell itself, which is like a great dark cave into which the sea flows in a black torrent. They jest without fear of the gods that they will sail into that infernal abyss itself and ransack even Hell for gold.’

Despite the warmth of the fire, Seirian shivered.

‘Then what must we do?’ asked Lucius.

‘The last of the Celtic kingdoms will fight against the pagan invaders,’ said Gamaliel. ‘And the fight will be glorious.’

‘Will Britain be extinguished in the end?’

‘Every nation and empire will be extinguished in the end,’ said Gamaliel with a gentle sadness. ‘But not all will live on in legend as gloriously as the last of the Celtic kingdoms will live on.’ He looked into the fire. ‘It is as our soothsayers have said. It is as the Man of Myrddin has said. A hard age is coming for us all, and everywhere beyond the frontiers the tribes are stirring. The Saxons are a fierce people, yet no fiercer than the Sueves or the Goths or the Vandals, nor yet that other tribe that will come from farthest off. “Storm from the east, O Storm that will not cease.”’

‘What will become of us, Gamaliel?’

Gamaliel smiled. Often, when he was at his gloomiest, as if surprised by a cheerfulness which welled up from deep within and which no one else could feel or comprehend, his lined and ancient face would break into a mysterious smile, and he would say, as he said now, ‘All will be well, and all manner of things will be well.’

‘How can that be?’

‘What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly, as I was told by a wise old man whom I met in the mountains between China and the deserts of Scythia.’

‘You talk in riddles, old friend.’

‘I talk in riddles because life is a riddle. Not a riddle to be solved, either, but one to be taken upon your shoulders, as you would take a heavy load, and to be carried on down the road, singing the praises of the world that God in his wisdom has made, untroubled in your heart.’ He stirred the fire with the battered end of his staff. ‘And, just so, we will bring your Cadoc back. For he is of the line of Bran, praise-singer and hymn-maker, and he was born for a purpose, which will not be served by his standing in chains in the slave markets of Colonia Agrippina.’

Seirian winced at the cruel image and bowed her head. But Gamaliel would do nothing to lessen the truth of Cadoc’s plight. He only said again, ‘We will bring him back.’

‘ Can you bring him back?’ asked Seirian, aggression and anger in her doubt.

Gamaliel said, ‘We shall see.’ He smiled gently at her and laid his dry old hand over hers. ‘In the heart of the darkest night-time, we shall see.’

‘Riddler,’ said Lucius.

Gamaliel rested his other hand on Lucius’ muscular forearm. ‘Old friend,’ he said.

The next morning, Seirian and Gamaliel stood watching Ailsa herding the chickens out into the yard, with Lucius up on the hill above, mending a fence by first light.

Seirian said to Gamaliel, ‘He does not talk.’

Gamaliel sighed. ‘He is a soldier, not an orator. If you want to know his heart, mark his deeds, not his words. You know how little he wants to go back to the empire. He only wants to find his son – for himself, for Ailsa, and for you. Watch his heavy tread and his weariness as he walks the road out of the valley. Remember why he does it, and with what heaviness of heart he leaves you again. Do not doubt him.’

‘I do not doubt him!’ exclaimed Seirian with sudden fierceness, her eyes flashing darkly. ‘I have never doubted him. There is not a breath of cowardice or faithlessness in him. It is that which makes me despair. A weaker man would give up, and stay home, and, and…’

‘And you would live happily ever after?’

She looked down at the rough cobbles of the yard, and shook her head. ‘No. You are right. It is because he is going that I love him. If he stayed by our fireside and tended me, all smiles and kisses and sweet nothings, like some high-born noble lover, I would despise him a little.’ She smiled a little at the contrariness of the human heart.

‘He is a good man,’ said Gamaliel. ‘Good is the opposite of weak, and it often enjoys little comfort and contentment in the world. Be patient, and watch over Ailsa like a mother-hawk, as I know you will. And watch, too, for the dark shadows of the Saxon longships, for there is no knowing when they may come again. We will be back. Before too long, we will be back, with your son, and you will be a family once more.’

Seirian brushed her tears angrily from her eyes and nodded briskly. ‘I know. I know. Here,’ and she turned and slipped back into the cottage. Gamaliel followed her in, stooping low so as not to bump his head, as he had often done before. She retrieved a cloth package from the bread oven beside the hearth and thrust it into his gnarled hands. ‘I made some honey-cakes.’

‘Ah, the far-famed honey-cakes of Seirian, daughter of Maradoc!’ cried Gamaliel, raising them above his head. ‘How can we come to harm with such talismans of great power in our pockets? Surely even the gods look down and smell their savour rising unto heaven, and toss aside their bowls of ambrosia and their cups of nectar, and wish themselves mortal men upon the earth, that they might taste the joys of the blessed honey-cakes of Seirian, daughter of Maradoc!’

‘Enough, enough, you old fool!’ cried Seirian, and she bundled the old man out of doors into the sunshine.

Ailsa had finished herding the chickens to her satisfaction, and she came over to him and stopped in front of the tall old man and squinted up. ‘Cadoc showed me the flowers, and he always caught fish,’ she said, ‘lots of fish. He was very clever.’

‘He still is very clever,’ said the old man gently.

Aisla stared up at him. ‘Now when we have breakfast he’s not there

… You will find him again, won’t you?’

He laid his hand on her mop of curls. ‘Have no fear, little one. Your brother will be here again soon.’

They left the next morning at dawn. Seirian and Lucius clung to each other wordlessly and with such desperate longing that Gamaliel had to turn away in his sorrow for them. He felt his hand plucked by a smaller hand, and he looked down into Ailsa’s bright brown eyes.

‘Are you going, too?’ she asked.

‘Yes, little one, I am going, too.’

‘Your hands are all dry and wrinkly. Are you a captain of a ship?’

‘Not exactly, no.’

‘But I like your hands anyway,’ she added hurriedly.

‘Thank you, my dear.’

‘And you’re too old to fight any bad men.’

‘That is true.’

‘So what do you do?’

Gamaliel smiled. ‘I wonder that myself sometimes,’ he murmured. ‘Well, I will keep your father company on the long voyage to find your brother.’

‘But you don’t know where he is.’

‘We don’t know exactly. ’

‘So how will you find him?’

‘By looking.’

Ailsa thought for a while. ‘Sometimes I find things by looking. I found my hoop in the pighouse the day before yesterday, and I never put it down there, and the pigs don’t play hoop. They’d be too fat and it’d get stuck round their middles.’ She frowned. ‘And sometimes I can’t find things and give up, and then they come to me anyway. It’s odd, isn’t it? Does that happen to you?’

‘Ah,’ said Gamaliel, ‘all the time.’

‘Hm,’ said Ailsa. Then she ran off to play.

Lucius and Seirian came over hand in hand, and she kissed Gamaliel, and he said quiet words to her, and she nodded and smiled with an effort. Then all three of them held hands in a triangle.

Gamaliel said to Seirian, ‘The Comforter be with you. May He guard your fields by day, may She sit at your fireside by night.’

Seirian replied, ‘May the road rise up to meet you, may the sun make his face to shine upon you, may God be the third traveller who walks by your side as you go.’

Lucius and Seirian said nothing to each other, and Gamaliel knew why. The deepest things cannot be caught in words.

Ailsa came running back and pushed into the triangle indignantly, so they had to make it a square. She closed her eyes and prayed, ‘May Daddy and the old man not have to go to bed without any supper ever, or be killed or eaten by sea-monsters, or anything else.’ She thought, and added, ‘Or even just get their arms and legs bitten off, and have to come home in a wheelbarrow.’

At which they all solemnly said, ‘Amen,’ and the little group broke up.

Lucius and Gamaliel took up their leather packs, and Gamaliel took his yew-staff in his hand.

Ailsa ran to Lucius and threw her arms round his legs. ‘You didn’t come back for very long,’ she said. ‘I didn’t even remember you when you came back.’

Lucius kept his voice steady. ‘I am only going away one more time, and I will come back with your brother.’

The little girl beamed with delight. Seirian lifted her into her arms, and they watched from the rickety wooden gateway as the two men, the tall, grey-eyed, broad-shouldered younger man, and the other, lean, rangy and as old as the hills, walked on together up the lane towards the ridgeway and the east.