The boy was gazing at the coin Lucanus still held up in front of him. "Mark Antony!" His voice was as hushed as mine had been; he knew of Mark Antony from his lessons. "Did he come to Britain?"
It was Luke who answered him, handing the coin back to the lad. "No, Arthur, Mark Antony died in Egypt, fighting against his former friend, Julius Caesar's nephew Octavius, who then crowned himself emperor and took the name Caesar Augustus."
"Caesar Augustus? The one above the main gates?"
Luke made a face and looked to me fen: guidance. "I don't know. I didn't look. Most unobservant of me. Merlyn?"
I grinned at him, but spoke to the boy. "The answer is yes and no. Octavius Caesar Augustus was the first emperor. He was also the first divine emperor. All the others that followed named themselves after him. The one above the gates was Hadrian Caesar Augustus, remember?" He nodded, and I continued. "But think of your find this way, Arthur. In every fight there is a winner and a loser, and the Fates, often at whim, it appears, decree which shall be which. Had they decided otherwise the day Mark Antony fought Octavius Caesar, you might now have been holding a likeness of the first emperor of Rome in your hand."
"Hmm." He closed his fist tightly around the coin. "May I keep this?"
"Of course. You found it."
"I know you said he wasn't a god, Merlyn, but how could they even try to make him one?"
I smiled. 'They couldn't. Gods are immortal. That was sheer flattery. They called him a god, but he was only a man, and he proved it by dying like all other men. Have you noticed you were right about the gate, too? There's only one portal." I ignored Lucanus's raised eyebrow.
"I know, I saw it. Let's go and look outside." The boy stepped between us and took hold of our hands, wrapping his fingers around two of mine, and led us out, tugging impatiently, beyond the gates. Just a few paces brought us to the cliff's edge, where we all three stopped in awe, smitten by the spectacle before us.
Beneath our feet, the cliff face fell vertically, bare of vegetation for most of its vertiginous plunge to a shattered ruin of scree and fallen boulders seemingly miles beneath our perch. Its far-flung edges were lost among the forest of trees that stretched from there as far as we could see in every direction. We had been riding through that forest all morning, but seen from above, it was like a thick, green mat covering everything except that tumbled, lethal wasteland directly at our feet. Even the road and the river Esk, which I knew were down there, almost directly beneath us, were concealed by the denseness of the overhanging tree- tops. Arthur, who had let go of Lucanus to lean closer to the edge, but whose hand still clutched my Own, drew back instinctively from the gulf, drawing close to my side even though there was no danger of his falling. When he turned to look up at me, his eyes were enormous.
"How far down is it?'
"I've no idea." I tried to keep my voice light, since I could see there was no need to warn him of the danger here. "But the beautiful part of it is that it's too far up ever to be a threat to this place. No army could climb that, nor any single man I've ever met."
"No." He moved forward again, bending cautiously from the waist. "All those rocks, did they fall from die cliff?'
"Aye, they did, every one of them. That's why there are no trees on the cliff face. But there's grass on many of the ledges down there, and it's thick in places, so nothing has fallen recently."
"Hmm." He sounded far from convinced. But then, after a few mole moments' contemplation of the abyss itself, he turned his eyes outward to where the oak- and ash- and beech-covered hills shepherded the valley westward to the sea beneath low, cloudy skies of varying greys. There was nothing there to mar the forest's deep-green mantle. The peaks behind us, to the south and east, were hidden by the walls that reared at our backs. Only to the north-east did the high cliffs of the largest Fells shrug themselves free of timber.
"It's beautiful, isn't it, Merlyn? So different from Camulod."
"Aye, lad, it is. You think it more beautiful?"
"No-o, and yet yes. The mountains ... "
"You've never seen Cambria, have you?"
He threw me a glance, much more an eighteen-year- old's than an eight-year-old's, that included Lucanus and told both of us that I knew very well he had not. I grinned.
"You will, some day, I promise you, and you'll find that the mountains there, too, are beautiful, and very, very different."
"Different from these? How can that be?"
I shook my head. "As soon as you see them, you'll know. They're higher, for one thing. On some of them, in the highlands, the snow never melts. Their crests are white all year round."
He looked up at me in open disbelief. 'That's impossible. The summer sun would melt it."
"Not in Cambria, Arthur, nor anywhere else where the mountains are high enough."
"High enough for what? To escape the sun?"
I shrugged. "I suppose you might put it that way. They don't escape the light, but they do evade the heat. It's a known fact that, no matter where you are, the higher you climb above that level where the land meets the waters of the sea, the colder the air becomes. If you climb high enough, you reach a point where even the summer rain falls as snow." I grinned at him. "It's true! Ask Lucanus. He and I have ridden into summer storms, on uphill journeys in high land, where the rain turned to snow as we rode higher. And we've turned around and ridden down again, out of the swirling snowstorm to where there was no sight of snow and the rain still fell. Didn't you notice how cool it became today, when we started climbing the hill out of the valley to come up here?"
He nodded, remembering. "But why, Merlyn? Why is that?"
"I wish I could tell you, lad, but I can't. Luke, do you know?"
Lucanus shrugged his shoulders slowly. "No, I do not. But I know it is true. Heat seems to be heavier than cold, Arthur, if you can imagine such a thing, because it always grows colder, the higher you climb. And yet heat rises upward from a fire, so that the upper part of a room is always much warmer than the temperature at floor level. Contradictory, in the extreme, but true, nonetheless, and defying explanation."
"Hmm." The complexities of the abstraction were too much for the boy, and he dismissed them. "Does this valley have a name? Do you know?"
"I don't really know," I answered him. "I know the river we crossed down there is called the Esk, so this would be the valley of the Esk."
He was staring towards the western horizon, where it flattened visibly beyond the shoulder of the farthest, mist-hazed hill. "Could we see the sea from here, on a bright day?"
I followed his gaze. "I think we could. That flat part is the line of it, I believe. It's out there somewhere."
He turned to face the wall of the fort. "And what's beyond the crest of the pass where the road goes over?"
"Another valley, I imagine, and another, and then eventually another town like Ravenglass, at the end of the road."
"Was there a fort there, too?"
"Aye, and a vicus. As I said, a town just like Ravenglass."
"Cumbria ... " He murmured the ancient name of the region surrounding us, drawing it out so that the "m" became a resonant hum. "What's the difference between Cumbria and Cambria?"
I smiled, raising an inquisitive eyebrow towards Luke, who merely shrugged and made a face indicating ignorance of this, too. "They're both ancient names. There was probably no difference, at one time. They might be the same name, differing only in the way the people say them ... And before you ask me what it means, I'll tell you I don't know. But all of it is Britain, Arthur." And some day it could be yours, I thought. "Come now, we'd better go back into the fort and look at what is there. You'll have questions aplenty then, I'll wager."