‘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 mortaclass="underline" 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 -’