“How do you know?” Lance demanded fiercely. “I don’t understand. How did you come to be in this place of all others, at this very time?”
“It’s not so strange, is it? This is the only place to rest between the coast and Pons Aelius.” Ban tipped his bowl to his mouth to drain the rest of his broth. Then he sighed, and looked properly at his son. “I will tell you the truth. Your mother always said you were one of the dragon’s brood, even more than your sisters, and perhaps you won’t think I’m off my head. I had a dream in the early hours of this morning, when I was sleeping by a campfire three miles south of here. And in this dream an old woman spoke to me, and then...”
“Then she turned into a hare.”
“That’s right. May the gods of the Romans and the dragon’s cave forgive me for what I did at Vindolanda, Lance. I don’t know if they ever will. But I’m going back there now, to care for the place as best I can.”
Lance rubbed his eyes. What did Ban have left? Ten or twenty good years, he supposed. For all his trials, he was barely forty summers old. He was thin and wiry, much of his strength undiminished. Even stripped of his heart, he would make a good village chieftain, by rote and by habit... Yes, it would do. Lance could reconcile it to his conscience. His own heart leapt and started to race. Old angers and fears fell away. “I’m glad we met,” he said truthfully. “Can I help your journey onwards? I can pay for your horse’s feed and keep here.”
Ban pulled a rueful face. “And grateful she’d have been for that, if I hadn’t had to sell her, too.”
“Oh.” Lance pulled open the pouch at his belt. He took out the coins he’d have used to hire a mount for himself and ride on. “Take this, Father. A king shouldn’t have to return to his people on foot.”
Chapter Four
Lance would never forget his first sight of Din Guardi fort. In all the years that followed, rich with joy, blood and sorrow as they were, his memory never lost that shape on the horizon, the proud crest rising from the wild coastal flatlands, as he and Drusus left the Roman road and began their approach through the maze of Celtic lanes, lined with tangles of frosted hawthorn at this time of year. Hawthorn trackways, and then vast sweeps of heath, scattered with gorse thickets, a few dried-out blossoms holding on still. A confusing country, lonelier even than the Vindolanda moors, home only to the clean sea winds.
His instinct was to point Balana at the great rock in the distance and set her to a gallop. Drusus laid a restraining hand to his rein. “Wait a moment, sire.”
They had halted on a crest of high ground, where Din Guardi dominated the whole seaward horizon. The shape of it resonated deep inside Lance’s mind. He was looking at the dragon’s furthest stretch, her vast sleeping head, lapped by white sands and the cold north sea. “How far away are we, Drusus?”
“No more than ten miles. But this is the most dangerous stretch—we have to take care. The land’s half overrun with Anglian settlers and pirates, and... Well, you’ll see for yourself. We’ll approach through the villages where we have friends. Follow me.”
Lance started to obey, then drew Balana to a halt again. The question he hadn’t meant to ask was in his mouth before he could prevent it. “Is it true that Arthur’s to be married?”
Drusus frowned. He gave Lance a curious look, not unsympathetic. “Once more, it’s a thing that you’ll have to see for yourself. But, yes, his marriage is planned. If he lives.”
The last words blew away unworthy thoughts—disbelief, a first ache of jealousy—like sand from wind-scoured stone. Art could marry a hundred times, if only he would rise from his sickbed whole. It was his duty as king. Who knew what political alliances he would seal by taking a bride from among the tribes of the Old North?
Or perhaps he’d just fallen in love. A shiver ran through Lance, and he settled his cloak around him before following Drusus downhill and back onto the track. After all, what had Lance been to him? A day and a night, Art’s hands on him so tender and skilled that his experience, all the lovers he’d taken before, had shone out of him like sacred light. He’d never said otherwise. He’d told Lance the truth of it easily, with all the sweet pride of his nature. Except for the Beltane with his half-sister Modron, he was untouched by priestly fears or restrictions. It was better so.
When he and Drusus broached a seven-mile radius of the castle, he began to notice strange changes. The flatlands were sparsely dotted with small farms and hamlets. In these, the travellers were given a cautious welcome. Until the coming of the Romans, this land had been Votadini territory, and, just as at Vindolanda, these fierce Celts had absorbed their conquerors. They worked the sandy soils for a living, called themselves Britons just as Lance did. They had recognised Lance and Drusus as their own, Roman credentials displayed in their dark hair and the fine horses they rode. The women brought them bread and wine, eager to tell them how some of their own sons had gone to try their fortunes in the army of King Artorius.
This close to Din Guardi, though, many of the farms were deserted. Lance saw no smoke rising from their chimney holes, and no dogs came running to bark around his horse. The silences near the dwelling places were strange. Lance, the cautious hunter, eased ahead of Drusus and began to lead them down tracks with better cover, avoiding the open heath. If Drusus was amused by this takeover bid from the newcomer, he gave no sign.
The empty fields and houses didn’t look like the work of invaders. The buildings were mostly untouched. The damage seemed confined to the fields. There were odd barren places in the stubble, broad streaks where the earth was exposed. These marks gave Lance a weird pang of fear at his heart, stalwart traveller as he was, and the horses snorted and boggled at them too, and carried their riders past at a gallop.
Simpler on the face of it were the bodies of dead cattle they encountered from time to time. Cattle raids had been a fact of Lance’s life since boyhood. If the thieves were too few in number to herd the beasts away, they would catch one and kill it on the spot, butcher from it as much as they could carry, and disappear, leaving such sorry remains as the ones he and Drusus were seeing now, half-decayed and tainting the breeze with the stench of decomposition. But when he looked more closely—pushing Balana’s flanks with his heels, because she didn’t like these corpses any more than she had the poisoned fields—he didn’t recognise the wounds on them.