"How may I serve you? You must forgive me, I fear I am unused to having women here in my rude quarters."
"Aye, that's obvious." Shelagh was smiling, her eyes twinkling and full of mischief. "I have brought Tressa here to see what she must do. She will be looking after two of you, yourself and Lucanus, keeping your quarters clean and bright and aired, and mending your clothes and whatever else may require looking after."
"But—"
"No, no buts, Cay. That is the law, according to Shelagh, and you will save us all much grief and inconvenience if you will simply accept it as decreed. You men are the great ones for laying down laws, but there are times when women's laws are better and more sensible, and this is one of them. You work on those things that concern you,
and Tressa here will keep your surroundings neat and clean enough to make your work as pleasant as may be. Do you understand me?"
"But—"
"But? Pardon us, Cay, but we came here apurpose. Now, if you will stand aside, I wish to show Tressa her duties. Tressa, come."
I stood gape-mouthed and watched them as they examined every vestige of my quarters, talking between themselves and taking note of everything they thought to change or better. My initial annoyance passed, and soon I found myself taking pleasure in the sight of both of them. Tressa was no beauty, but she was young and radiant with health, buxom and sprightly enough to suffer little side by side with Shelagh's older, glowing loveliness. Both women were round and full where women needed to be both, and as they spoke together, both laughed quietly from time to time. Presently they completed their examination and returned to where I stood by the window.
"Well," Shelagh said, "I've shown Tressa what's in store for her. She'll keep out of your way, as much as possible, doing what she has to do during the day while you're about your business. The only reason you will have to know that she's about will be the uncustomary pleasantness with which you will be surrounded from now on. Good day to you."
Tressa bobbed, with her shy smile, and whispered my name again, her soft Cumbrian brogue doing strange things to the vowel sounds, and then they were gone, leaving me feeling as though I had been paraded, inspected and assessed—all of which was true. I stood at the window, watching them as they went out, and after they had gone from sight I remained there, peering out at the weather.
Between the top of the fort's outer wall and the line of the overhanging eaves above my window, I could see blue sky and small, white clouds scudding across it at a speed that suggested a high, brisk wind. Suddenly the room seemed dark and cold, unnaturally quiet now that the women's voices had been added, then subtracted. I strode to the door, collecting my cloak from a peg as I went outside into the brightness of the mid-morning sunlight.
I found nothing unusual in the silence that greeted me. Even with the recent growth in our numbers, tripling our presence here, fifty people were barely noticeable in a fort built to house six hundred, and the times when all fifty were present within the fort were few and far between. I knew that the wood-gathering party was in the forest again that day, as it had been for the previous seven, so that took care of at least ten men and probably closer to a score. Ambrose was out with Dedalus and Rufio, practising with the staves that fascinated him nowadays. Shelagh and Tressa had disappeared, presumably to join the other women who would all be indoors at their women's work at this time of day, and the boys would already be out beyond the walls, the morning hours of their tuition long over. Somewhere in the distance I thought I heard the sound of high, girlish voices; many of the newcomers had brought young families along with them, and the place was now bright with children of both sexes, where before there had been only the four boys from Camulod. I saw only one other living soul, one of the newcomers whose name I had not yet learned, as I made my way to the northern postern gate. We exchanged silent nods in passing and then I was outside, walking forward the few paces that took me to the edge of the precipice overlooking the valley at the rear of our perch.
Ahead of me to my right, on the far north-eastern side of the valley, the Fells soared up to tower over me. But it was the valley far beneath my feet that drew my attention, because the entire floor of it seemed to be alive, writhing with movement like woven matting covering a swarm of rats. The carpet, as I well knew, was made of enormous oak trees, and the turbulence that agitated them was caused by massive gale-force winds blowing inland from the western sea, twelve and more miles away along the vale of the Esk. Even here, on the heights above, the power of that wind was undiminished, buffeting me with heavy blows as it surged up the unyielding face of the cliff at my feet.
I stepped even closer to the edge, aware of my own foolishness yet seemingly powerless to resist the urge to look down at the cliff face itself. The pressure of the wind increased, becoming a solid, living thing, so that I had to force myself forward into it, leaning out against its power while listening to my mind screaming at me to step back and stop being a fool. It was a strange sensation, hanging there, leaning my weight into that wind for what seemed a long, long time, knowing that if it died without warning I would, too, falling out into the space that taunted me. For long heartbeats I felt convinced that by merely spreading my arms and diving outward I would find the power of flight and might swoop like a bird, in safety, down to the trees beneath. I even raised my arms, holding them out before me and feeling the pressure of the air beneath them filling the folds of my cloak and lifting it to flap like wings about me, before I blinked and stepped back, dropping my hands to my sides and feeling my cloak subside and the hair settle down on my head again as the direct flow of air from beneath was interrupted by the edge of the cliff. As I stepped back, the wind died, without warning, as I had feared it might mere moments earlier. For a count of four heartbeats the air was utterly still and I shuddered with horror, clearly imagining my own body plunging downward into the abyss over which I had so recently been poised. Then the gale returned with a blustering, muffled roar, and I stepped away resolutely, turned my back on the valley and re-entered the fort, making my way straight to the stable where Germanicus was tethered.
Moments later, I left the fort again through the main, southern gate, waving to Lucanus, whom I had noticed walking the interior perimeter road dose against the wall. As I emerged from the gateway and kneed my mount along the approach to the main road, passing the bathhouse and cresting the rise that hid the fort itself from the roadway, I glanced upward to my left, to where the narrow ribbon of the road snaked its way up the final approach to the pass to the next valley, and my eye was arrested by a flash of white. Reining in my horse, I looked more carefully and saw that the whiteness was at least one of the piebald ponies belonging to the four boys, although there was no sign of the boys themselves. Curious, I swung Germanicus eastward when I reached the road and kneed him upward, towards the saddleback of the pass.
I knew the boys came up here often, particularly during the winter months, when they had spent their days sledding down from the heights. I myself had made no attempt to approach the crest of the pass since the first and only time I had been up there, late in the autumn, long before the first snowfall of the winter. I had forgotten how unimaginably steep the incline of the roadway was. As we ascended, Germanicus was forced to lean further and further into each mounting step, battling to force his weight and mine upward, his shod hooves scrabbling and sliding on the hard, slippery, cobbled surface of the roadway as he fought to negotiate each tightly twisting curve on the serpentine slope. I found myself imagining again the agony and grief of the legionaries and wagon drivers who must have sweated and racked themselves struggling to control heavy-laden wagons, drawn by teams of oxen and mules, on such an impossibly pitched surface, only to face even greater difficulties on the downward slope beyond the crest.