“ ‘Missing, presumed killed in action’,” murmured Audley. “Or maybe even ‘AWOL’, as we used to record more uncharitably in some cases.”
“It’s how he was when they found him, you see,” explained the girl. “He had his arms flung out wide, with all his equipment and his sword still in his hand, like David says. And what Dr Johns says is that if his own side had buried him they might have left his weapons with him, but they’d have laid him out properly at the very least. But if his side had lost, then the other side would have stripped him—they wouldn’t have let perfectly good weapons go to waste.”
Benedikt looked around him. The gently sloping meadow betrayed no tell-tale signs of what lay beneath it, except where the trial excavations had been dug. It wasjust a field, with trees on three dummy1
sides of it, the roofs of Duntisbury Royal peeping through them on one side, bounded on the fourth by the churchyard wall and the tree-shaded church itself. And it looked as though it had been just a field since the beginning of time.
You must rebuild inyour imagination, was what Papa always said about sites such as this. But it required an immense effort of will to raise up a great mansion in this grassy emptiness—a house with colonnades, and many rooms, and gracious pavements on which Orpheus had tamed his wild beasts in the lamplight, where generations of people had lived.
And then one day . . . one night . . . this dream of a great house had turned into a nightmare, with the red flower of the raiders’ fires bursting out of the thatch of the out-buildings as the house died, signalling the end of civilisation—
But it probably hadn’t been anything like that, he disciplined himself: the end would more likely have come much more slowly and ignominiously, with the original owners of the Orpheus pavement long gone, and their uncouth inheritors squabbling in the decayed ruins with invaders who were almost indistinguishable from them, but more virile.
The bleakness of that conclusion roused him. Whatever way the Duntisbury Roman villa had gone down into the dark, it was of no importance to him.
He blinked at Audley through the thick lenses of the spectacles.
“That is a most interesting theory, Dr—Dr Audley.”
Audley smiled. “Not mine, Mr Wiesehöfer. And not the most dummy1
interesting thing about the Fighting Man either, to my way of thinking.”
Benedikt looked at him questioningly.
“He was killed close to the door—almost in the doorway. They know that because of the position of the post-holes left by the door-posts.”
“So?” He thought there was something curiously mischievous in Audley’s smile.
“So . . . how was he killed? And who killed him?” Audley paused.
“Supposing the barn didn’t fall on him and kill him . . . and if it was just about to collapse he would hardly have gone into it ... did some poor frightened little Briton stab him from behind as he went in—someone lurking just inside the door, say? Or did some hulking great German—I beg your pardon!— some hulking great Saxon or Jutish warrior spear him from the front, while he was defending the doorway like Horatius on the bridge?”
Benedikt frowned. “But did you not say—or was it not Miss Maxwell-Smith who said . . . that he was a Saxon warrior?”
The smile was almost evil now. “That’s what the experts think, yes. But apparently there were people called ‘ foederati’ in those days, Mr Wiesehöfer.”
“Foedus” piped up Benje suddenly. “Foedus— foederis ... ‘a league between states or an agreement or covenant between individuals’—that’s the noun . . . But there’s an adjective foedus which means ‘foul, filthy and horrible’—L ike foedi oculi means
‘bloodshot eyes’, like Blackie Nabb’s got on Sunday mornings—”
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“Benje!” snapped Miss Maxwell-Smith, suddenly much older than her years. “You mustn’t say that about Blackie.”
“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” Benje was not overawed by his heroine.
“Dad says if it wasn’t for the Old General, Blackie ‘ud ’ave been disqualified from driving years ago—” he caught himself too late as he realised he had mentioned someone the memory of whom would pain her. “Sorry, Becky!”
“My fault—” interposed Audley quickly “—I told young Benjamin about foedus and the foederati.... We were having a discussion about the Latin language, and we decided the Roman-Britons must have made a joke of it—how their new Foreign Legion of great hairy beer-swilling Ger— Saxon— mercenary bodyguards were a filthy lot, with bloodshot eyes, like—”
“David!” Miss Maxwell-Smith treated Dr Audley with the same disapproval as Benje.
“Sorry, Becky.” Audley accepted the rebuke meekly, as though accepting also that Mr Blackie Nabb’s drinking habits were now under Miss Maxwell-Smith’s special protection. “The point is, Mr Wiesehöfer, that there were these Saxon foederati who were hired, and eventually given land to settle on, in return for protecting the Britons against their own Saxon folk who came raiding.” He stared at Benedikt for a moment. “So . . . was our Fighting Man one of the foederati being true to his salt, to the death, like a good mercenary?
Or was he a raider who came up the valley from the east, or over the hill from the south, to get his comeuppance and his just deserts, eh? Only time will tell!”
So that was it, thought Benedikt: Audley could hardly have made it dummy1
plainer if he had inscribed it in deeply-chiselled stone for his benefit.
“So! Yes . . .” He met the big man’s stare with obstinate innocence, refusing to be overborne by it. “That is something which only your experts will be able to tell—and perhaps not even they will be able to provide an answer to satisfy you.”
“Were there foederati in Germany?” Benje’s eyes were bright with intelligence. “The Romans had German provinces, didn’t, they?
They must have had German soldiers—they had British soldiers in their army, you know.”
It was impossible not to meet a boy like Benje.more than half-way.
“There have been German soldiers in the British Army, young man. Our Hanoverian Corps in my grandfather’s time carried the name ‘Gibraltar’ among the battle honours on the flags of its regiments—‘ Mit Eliot zu Ruhm und Sieg’ was written on their standards: ‘ With Eliot to Glory and Victory’—we helped to defend your rock once upon a time, under a General Eliot . . . And we fought in Spain, for your Duke of Wellington—”
“Garcia Hernandez,” said Audley suddenly. “The King’s German Legion broke a French square there—the 1st and 2nd Dragoons, under Major-General von Bock . . . He’d already been wounded—
it was after the battle of Salamanca—and he was extremely short-sighted, like you, Mr Wiesehöfer .... But he was a splendid chap, and those KGL regiments were by far the best cavalry Wellington had—the best ones on either side, in fact . . . the British were the best horsemen, but as soldiers they were undisciplined rubbish, most of them—Garcia Hernandez was the finest cavalry action of dummy1
the whole campaign. Rommel would have been proud of them.”
Benedikt looked at Audley in total suprise. The man had been in a British armoured regiment in 1944, of course, so he was a cavalry man of sorts—the dossier said as much. But it had also stated quite clearly that he was a medievalist when not an eccentric ornament of British Intelligence.