"I tried to gauge that from down below. As far as I could tell, judging by your size in the middle of the ring and the length of your shadow, the outer edge should be about four or five paces on either side of you. " I looked where he indicated. My shadow was long on the grass of the hillside.
"I lost sight of the ring as soon as I started to climb the hill, " I said.
"Did you?"
"I saw it plainly as you climbed the hill, and that's why I was able to guide you into it. But I lost it, too, as soon as I began to climb. There may be something magical about this place. "
"There is. " I slid from my horse's back to the ground, heading directly to my right, my eyes fixed firmly on the ground ahead of me, and within five paces, there it was: the rim of the ring. Unless a man had been looking for it in exactly that spot, he would never have noticed it. It was no more than a ridge of slightly raised earth, about ten or twelve inches high at its highest point, but once detected, the entire perimeter was easily traceable. I too was breathing hard now, barely able to contain myself as I realized where I was standing. I stepped over the raised outline and walked another twenty paces across the hillside before turning to look back. Sure enough, there was a slight but definite bowl-shaped depression within the ring. I walked back to the middle of the circle with triumph swelling in my chest.
"What does it mean, Varrus?" Meric was completely bewildered. "Is this important?"
I laughed aloud, my excitement making the laugh sound false even to me. "Important?" I looked at Luceiia, who was still mounted and was looking at me as if I had suddenly become possessed. "Luceiia, do you think this is important?" Her eyes were wide and baffled. "I want you to go over there, both of you, to where I was a few minutes ago, then tell me what you see. Please. "
They exchanged looks of polite mystification and moved off obediently. As they went, I led my horse out of the circle and returned to stand in its centre.
"Now, what can you see?"
They looked at each other, and then back at me, and Luceiia said,
"Nothing, Publius. "
"The ground, Luceiia! Look at the ground. Meric, I'm standing in the middle of the ring. Do you notice anything about it? Anything different?
Anything at all?" Meric's brow furrowed in concentration, and then I saw astonishment spread as he saw what I wanted him to see.
"It's bowl-shaped! As though it has been dug, hollowed out. There's a dip. "
"Yes, Meric. Luceiia? Can you see it now?" She nodded wordlessly.
"Good! Now you can come back. "
They rejoined me on foot, leaving their horses outside the circle. Both of them still looked distinctly puzzled.
"Don't you know where you are yet?" I asked them. Meric frowned. "We Druids have a circular temple to the sun on the great plain, but this is too small for such a place. "
"Hah!" I shouted. "Temple to the sun? Nothing so tame, Meric! It's a dragon's nest! We're standing in a dragon's nest!"
It was an unkind thing to say to them, and I almost choked with laughter when the colour drained abruptly from their faces and they immediately and instinctively looked around as if expecting to be seized and devoured. I could see instant, total belief in their eyes, and still laughing, I drew my sword and stuck it into the ground at my feet, probing for bedrock. There was practically no soil, except at the centre of the depression, where my blade sank almost to the hilt. I straightened up and sheathed the sword again.
"Come, " I said. "It's late. Next time we come back, we'll bring shovels and dig out the dragon's egg. "
There was still fear on their faces and wild laughter in my belly as I gathered some stones to build a cairn in the middle of the ring. After that, I helped Luceiia to mount before vaulting onto my own horse, and we headed for the crest of the hill with the sun now far down on our left. I had marked the site well. The cairn thrust upward, a finger for tomorrow, marking the location of the skystone that every instinct in my body told me lay buried beneath it.
"We'll be travelling a long way in the dark tonight, " I said, feeling again, for the first time in over an hour, the keen bite of the wind.
"Publius! Look!" It was Luceiia, and I heard awe in her voice as I reined in and turned. The sun was almost gone now, and, shadowed by its dying light, the outlines of five more circles were clearly visible on the hillsides and on the floor of the valley itself. I stared in astonishment and spoke into an almost religious silence.
"Dragons, my friends. " I said. "The place is a colony of dragons. "
XX
I had quizzed Luceiia about the distance facing us on our trip to the Mendips, long before the time came to set out. Her response had been that, according to Meric, the round trip was easily achievable in the space of a day.
It occurred to neither of us that Meric, being a Druid, looked on things like weather, time and distance from a perspective different to most people's. He would walk all night and all day and all night again, to get where he was going, and still not count it a two-day journey if he arrived before the sun rose again.
We had been on the road out for several hours, borne up on the excitement of the journey, before I began to have misgivings about the distance involved, and the length of time it might require. My doubts were fired by Meric's optimistically imprecise answers to such questions as,
"How much further do you think we have to go now?" It became clear to me eventually that the distance — despite the old Druid's protestations — was simply too great to permit an easy return journey in one day. By the time I realized it fully, however, we had been too far from the villa to return for extra supplies. It became a matter of returning home and starting again the next day, or suffering the inconvenience of a long, one-day, two-way trip on this single occasion. Luceiia's had been the final decision. At that time, it had still been a beautiful morning, with not a cloud in sight in the December sky. That changed within the next two hours. The weather grew gloomy and overcast, and on top of that we began to realize that we had underestimated the hardships of the excursion. For myself, I would have minded little, but Luceiia could hardly have been described as a hardened veteran of overland journeys. Meric, of course, was oblivious to all of this. Even so, knowing what we knew, we had still allowed ourselves to overstay our time in the valley, caught up in the hunt. Darkness began to fall quickly as we turned for home, and the rain that had been threatening all afternoon began to fall in earnest, adding to the chill of the biting wind. Meric's sense of direction failed him at one point and we spent almost an hour floundering around on the hillside, leading our horses and in grave danger of falling down inclines that were far steeper than any we had faced on the way up.
By the time we finally made it down from the flank of the last hill, it had been pitch-dark for hours and we were all three soaked to the skin and chilled, it seemed, to the marrow. The rain had become a steady downpour and the wind howled in gusts so violent that our world was reduced to nothing but Stygian blackness and dementing noise. There could not have been three more miserable people on the face of Britain that night, and we were still at least twelve miles from the Villa Britannicus.
Luceiia grasped me by the arm and leaned close to me to shout something into my ear, but so strong and loud was the wind that her words flew off into the darkness without reaching me. I waved and shook my head to indicate that I had not heard her and leaned even closer, angling my plodding horse so close to hers that our legs were pressed together. This time her lips almost touched my ear and I felt her warm breath on my skin, stirring that entire side of my body to goose-flesh, in spite of my chill.
"Shelter, " she shouted. "We have to find shelter quickly! We're hours away from home. "