It was a barrier that was impossible to scale. But here – where Marcus had led them – the wall became a bridge. The river was shallow, the arches wide enough to pass through. But how could they do so without being seen? It would be impossible to go unchallenged.
Yet here too Marcus had a plan. And once more, they were all entirely dependent on him.
He would ride back down the river then cut across country to the nearest town, he said. It was just over the next hill. At dusk he would come back to this spot in a loop, as though he had just then come from the west. He’d greet the soldiers, bringing them a jug of mulled wine on a cold night. In short, he’d distract them.
“It’s a cheerless spot. They won’t refuse my gift.”
Cassia asked, “They’ll have no suspicion?”
“I’m Roman. And I’m known here. I’ve traded this far north for the last two years. I can talk to them, keep them occupied for a while. Let Flavia go first – she’ll take the longest time to get clear. Silvio, you’ll help her, won’t you? Then Rufus. Cassia last. Go from here straight under the bridge, as far as the first bend in the river. There’s a copse that will give you some shelter. I’ll meet you there.”
It was a long day’s wait, keeping themselves concealed in the scrubby vegetation that grew along the length of the river. But Marcus was as good as his word. At dusk they heard hoofbeats and there he was, calling the soldiers, engaging them in conversation.
Flavia – bruised in the bear’s attack and now stiff from keeping motionless all day in the cold and damp – was awkward and slow to get going. Silvio almost carried her the distance to the bridge. It would take only one false step, one glance from the soldiers down at the water and all would be lost.
But Marcus had said he would distract them, and he did. Cassia couldn’t catch his words, but knew he was telling a tale from the way he held their rapt attention. When Silvio and Flavia had passed beneath the stone arches, Cassia prodded Rufus forward. He was reluctant to leave her and flung his arms around her waist. Her hands were on his back. Her fingers could trace the scars.
“Go,” she said. “On the other side you will be free. No master. No steward. No men with whips. I promise.”
He went. Limbs weakened from spending so long lying motionless in the cart, Rufus’s gait was awkward and shambling. But he too passed through without incident.
And then came Cassia’s turn.
She stepped into the water, ice-cold, fast-flowing, feeling the crunch of stones beneath her bare feet. In the dark it was impossible to know where to tread. She kept low to the water, fearing that she’d slip and that her splashing would alert the soldiers to her presence. Their loud laughter as she drew closer made her flush. They were talking of women. Foul jokes. Crude remarks. Coarse and unpleasant.
Marcus was doing what he had to and doing it well. She had to hold firm to that. But there were times when he didn’t make it easy to like him!
She was beneath the bridge now, feeling her way through, her hand on the mossy stones steadying herself.
Go to the first bend in the river, he’d told her. But she did not. As she’d worked her way towards the bridge, the wind had been veering around. By the time she reached the other side, it was against her, blowing a squall of rain into her face. She’d said she’d give him a signal: the call of an owl would let him know they were all through safe. But with the wind and the rain she knew that if she went too far, he wouldn’t hear her. So she stayed close, and was still in the shadow of the wall when she raised her cupped hands to her lips, blew between her thumbs and hooted like an owl.
By chance, or by fate, the wind dropped at that moment. And so she heard his remark fall from the bridge like a stone.
“Ah. So the bird flies free. Now I will see where it makes its nest.”
XXX
At dawn the next day Marcus met them at the place he’d described. How he’d passed through the wall without being questioned or stopped Cassia didn’t ask. She did wonder at it. And at the words he’d spoken.
But to question him – to look as though she didn’t trust him – would seem too ungrateful. They were free. Free! Breathing air where no master could give orders.
When he joined them he looked at her expectantly, as though now she was leader of their expedition. “Where to?” he asked. “I have brought you here. Now we’re all in your hands.”
Cassia wanted to get as far away from the wall as she could. To hide herself in the hills where she could neither see nor hear nor smell the influence of Rome. She looked at the horizon. Fixing her eyes on the furthest peak, she nodded towards it. “There.”
They set off. With each step Cassia filled her lungs with the sweet air. She looked at her feet – not those of a slave any more, but those of a free woman. They could carry her wherever she wished. There was no one to answer to but herself. With each step she felt a weight lifting from her shoulders and her euphoria was infectious: it spread throughout the party. Silvio picked Rufus up and swung him through the air.
“We have arrived! Gods be praised!” He threw back his head and laughed.
Flavia linked her arm through Cassia’s. Frail though she was, there was a light in her eyes that Cassia had not seen before. “I thought to die a captive,” the old woman said. Her mouth was open as if she wanted to add more but the words would not come. Her feelings seemed too large to be contained in language.
What they would do, how they would live, how they would eat: Cassia had not given such things any thought. For now they had food. But in the months, the years ahead?
Well … Silvio had always been skilled at setting traps. The slaves on the estate had been fed a meagre diet and Silvio’s trapped hares and squirrels had supplemented many a supper. There was no reason to suppose they wouldn’t find ample food in these hills.
The weather was warm now, but they would be needing shelter when the winter came. Oh, but there would be ways and means of building it. They were their own masters and not afraid of hard work. They could build themselves a roundhouse in time, and none of them need be driven by the whip.
And if they were to meet the barbarians?
They would deal with that problem if or when it came.
There would be time enough to worry about that then.
It was late morning, maybe an hour before noon, when the skin of Cassia’s arms prickled into goosebumps.
She could not have said how she knew it – she had heard nothing, seen nothing – and yet she felt they were being watched.
She stopped. Turned full circle.
There was nothing. The hum of insects. The cry of a buzzard. The footfalls of her companions.
“What’s wrong?” asked Marcus. “Are you tired? Should we rest awhile?”
“No. I thought… Someone’s looking at us.”
He cocked his head to one side, an eyebrow raised enquiringly. His hand went to the knife at his waist as he looked about him at the empty hills. “I see nothing.”
“Neither do I. But I feel it.”
They stood, scanning the horizon. But there was no movement. Nothing to see, nothing to hear.
But she could not rid herself of the sensation of eyes, pressing on her skin.
She exchanged a troubled glance with Marcus. He shrugged, but did not put the knife back in its sheath.
The others had seen them and now stopped walking. A look of panic passed across Rufus’s face. She didn’t wish to alarm him.
But when she took a step forward, the earth erupted at her feet.
A bird, startled from the heather, flew up into her face, squawking, flapping. She swung aside, her foot catching in undergrowth, so she fell sideways.
Marcus, throwing his knife, cut the creature from the air. It fell in a flurry of feathers, blood dropping like rain onto Cassia’s face and arms.
“That was your watcher,” Marcus assured her. “These hills are empty of any human life.”
They shared the bird over a fire that evening.
> Cassia was still preoccupied, and Marcus had no more to say on the matter. And yet she could not shake off the feeling that there was something out there other than birds and beasts. Something that was studying their every move.
For two more days they pressed on, one morning coming across the traces of a road that ran in a straight line from one horizon to the next. It was undoubtedly of Roman construction, but crazed with cracks, grass running between them, tree roots growing underneath, lifting stones, forcing them aside like an earthquake in slow motion.
“Romans were here?” Cassia asked Marcus.
“Once. Long ago. But no more, as you can see. There was a wall, I believe, some miles north of here. It was abandoned many years ago.”
“Why?”
“It could not be held.”
They said no more, but the conversation ignited something in Cassia’s mind.
Rome held the rest of Britannia in a stranglehold. There seemed no escape from the Empire’s rule. Her only chance of freedom had been to remove herself beyond its borders.
Yet here, in the land she now walked on, Romans had been driven back. That mighty army had been repelled. A road of Roman construction lay in ruins. Which must surely mean that Roman rule was not inevitable?
Things could change.
The same day they saw the Roman road Cassia began to feel something tugging at her.
It was faint to begin with. A sweet smell on the breeze. The call of a bird, the distant whisper of a mountain stream. The cry of a wolf, one calling to another.
But with each step it became stronger. She felt as though a cord was tied to her belly pulling her on.
She’d never set foot on this springy turf, never seen that line of hills, those mountains, those crags, that vast expanse of silvered lake in the far distance. Yet there was something familiar in it.
They were moving along a river valley, the hills rising high on either side. It was Cassia’s turn to ride awhile.
She had only just climbed astride the horse when she heard the voices.
“Can you hear that?”
“There is nothing,” Marcus said. “Nothing but the wind. The bees.”
She looked at Silvio. Flavia. Nothing.
Rufus.
Her brother had his head on one side. He seemed to be listening intently.
“Rufus, what do you hear?”
His eyes were glazed.
“Rufus?”
He did not reply. He heard them, though. She was sure of it. They were in his ears too. The women of her dreams. Not weeping or wailing now, not shouting or desperate. Singing softly, insistently. Calling.
Welcoming her.
She urged the horse forwards and then she was cantering, galloping ahead, ignoring Marcus’s yells to stop, to wait. Ignoring his increasingly desperate pleas to know where she was going, what she thought she was doing.
She rounded a bend in the river.
A few paces more and she would see it. The rowan tree, rooted in a rock.
She pulled the horse to a halt. Slipped from its back. Went on foot.
There it was. A pool, seemingly still, but one in which deep currents stirred, one that brimmed and tipped over flat rocks into a waterfall.
How was it that she knew this place? How was it that she had seen it in her dreams?
The women’s voices were at their loudest now, but still she could not make out the words. She was struggling so intently to catch their meaning that she did not hear the thud of approaching hooves, the slide of a man dismounting, walking steadily towards her.
She was gazing into the pool when a shadow appeared, gliding across the surface. Only then did she swing around.
A man. Club in hand, raised, blotting out the sun. Behind him, a line of warriors on shaggy ponies.
Bare-chested, bearded, wild-haired.
Spears, extended even as she watched, ten or more, pointing at her heart.
She saw it all in the instant before the club came down.
And for a long time after that, she saw nothing.
XXXI
It was dark when she woke. She was lying on a bed of bracken beside a fire. In a hut. A roundhouse. The smell of smoke and food was so familiar, and yet so strange.
For a moment she thought she’d been carried back to the estate of Titus Cornelius Festus. That these last months had been nothing more than an illusion. A dream.
She turned her head. It hurt.
Then she realized she was not alone. A woman was with her. Old. As old as Flavia. Watching her with an avid interest. There was a hunger in those eyes that struck fear into Cassia’s heart.
She spoke, but Cassia could not understand her. The old woman gestured to Cassia’s head, pointing to where she’d been struck. Cassia’s fingers went to the wound. The skin had split, she could feel the soreness of it, but it had been carefully washed and dried. Her fingers came away sticky, but not with blood. Some sort of herbal paste had been put upon the wound. Whatever they had used was effective. Considering the violence of the blow that had knocked her out, it ached surprisingly little.
She was dazed, though. She could not seem to order her thoughts clearly.
The woman held something out to her. A bowl. Meat. A few vegetables. The smell was appetizing. Sitting up slowly, she took the stew, along with the hunk of bread the woman proffered. Dipping it into the gravy, Cassia began to eat.
“Am I a captive?” she asked between mouthfuls. “A slave?”
The woman looked puzzled. She frowned and spoke again, but the words made no sense to Cassia’s ears. Both at a loss as to how to communicate they sat in silence until Cassia had eaten her fill.
And then the old woman stood, picked up a folded garment and shook it out for Cassia’s inspection.
The cloth was fine: a tightly woven dress of wool. In the firelight the colour was hard to tell but seemed a deep blue, threaded with lines of green that criss-crossed over each other. The woman appeared to want Cassia to put it on and there was no point resisting.
She stood. Allowed herself to be draped in it. The woman tied it around her waist with a belt made of finely tooled leather. And then a cloak of the same rich hue was fastened at her shoulder with a brooch.
When she was dressed the woman braided her hair, carefully, gently, winding it around her head, pinning it to conceal the dressing that she placed over Cassia’s wound.
And then a box was pulled out from a hole in the roundhouse wall. Inside was a twisted golden necklet, as thick as Cassia’s thumb. At each end of it was fashioned the golden head of a snarling wolf. Then earrings of coral and shell. Armbands with the same wolf motif, then rings of silver and copper twisted together.
They were put on, one after the other, until Cassia was dripping with jewellery.
It seemed a strange act of kindness, but it brought memories of Flavia, preparing her for Titus Cornelius Festus.
Was she being readied for the same reason? Had she come so far to escape the master, only to be violated by a barbarian? Or worse. What had they said in Londinium? That the savages north of the wall sacrificed their captives. That they ate their enemies’ hearts. Severed their heads and impaled them on poles. Was this some kind of ritual? Had she been cleaned and dressed simply to make a more attractive trophy?
Tears began to prick at the corners of her eyes.
Where was her brother? Where was Silvio? Flavia?
Marcus? Gods, what had happened to him?
Just then a man entered the hut, ducking low under the door lintel then stopping, standing, fixing her with his eyes.
It was the warrior who’d struck her.
A moment of blind terror squeezed her heart. But she raised her head, thrust out her chin. She wouldn’t show her fear. She wouldn’t give him that satisfaction.
But dimly, in the flickering firelight, she began to see that the look on his face was not triumph. Instead there was a hint of apprehension in his eyes. Regret, perhaps? Maybe even fear.
He s
kirted the fire, surprisingly light on his feet for so powerful a man. Stopping before her, he stood for a moment before sinking to his knees, taking her hands in his and pressing his forehead against her knuckles.
He was muttering in his strange tongue and, while she could not understand the sentences, she recognized the tone as one of deep and profound apology.
She found herself making soothing noises in response. Uttering words of forgiveness.
It was only when he raised his head that she saw the marks pricked into the skin of his wrists. Whirls, patterns of dots that exactly matched her own.
XXXII
The night took on the quality of a dream.
The warrior got to his feet. He did not touch her again, but extended an arm, gesturing that she should follow him out through the door.
In the open air she realized they were high up, on top of a hill, she guessed. There was something in the clearness of the air that suggested it. A fence, a circle of stakes, enclosed a flat ring of turf. Huts – roundhouses – were grouped in clusters. But there at the heart of the settlement was one larger than the rest.
She walked towards it between two lines of people. Men on one side, women on the other. Dogs on both. Huge animals, with amber eyes, grey coats and wolf blood clearly running through their veins.
Children poked their heads between their parents’ legs. She was surrounded by barbarians, who jostled and strained to see her face. They muttered to each other. Smiled if she caught their eye, before casting their gaze down in apparent respect.
She walked into the great house, where torches flamed and a fire danced in the centre, throwing shadows onto the roof beams.
There was Rufus – similarly dressed and bedecked in jewellery – his eyes round as an owl’s. He stood to the left of a great chair. A throne, in which a man sat. A woman was at his right side, and Cassia was shocked to note that she seemed the more powerful of the two. All eyes were on her as Cassia entered. The men only sat down when the woman nodded her permission. Certainly it was she who gave the order for the mead cup to be passed from mouth to mouth, and for the harpist to step from the crowd.