Dawn Wind (9 page)

She flung up her head and shifted uneasily, but no more; he chose a calf for his next target, throwing with all the strength and skill he possessed, and heard the young one bawl in pain and fright, as he ducked back behind the screening wreckage. Then he threw at the cow again before her unease had time to die away, and she snorted and flung up her head trying to turn full circle in the crowded pen. The fourth pebble caught a steer on its soft moist nose, and set it bellowing. The pen was a sea of tossing heads now, and he heard a warning shout from the direction of the fire as he lobbed the fifth pebble into their midst to keep the panic spreading. He had no need of the sixth pebble; a cow had gored one of the steers, the calves were bawling in terror, and the whole pen was in a milling turmoil. Suddenly the rough barricades burst and swirled aside, and the whole mass poured out into the open, bellowing and kicking and trying to horn each other as Owain, still clinging to Dog’s leash, rose with a yell behind them.

‘The cattle are stampeding!’ ‘Someone’s driving the cattle!’ ‘Attack—it’s an attack!’ he heard men shouting.

‘It’s the Saxons after all—!’ They were snatching up their spears as the lowing milch cows bore down upon them. The panic had spread to the ponies now, so that the poor little brutes threshed about neighing, terrified by the hobbles that dragged them to their knees. In a moment the entire Forum was a swirling and plunging chaos, shouts and cries, the lowing of cattle and the shrieks of ponies tore the air, and a bullock dashed right through the fire, bellowing as the flames scorched its hide and scattering burning fragments far and wide. And at that instant Regina twisted out of the slackened grasp of the man who held her, ducked under an outstretched arm, and came flying towards the Forum Gate.

Owain raced in the same direction, and reaching it first, turned for an instant to wait for her. She was running like a wild thing, her black hair flying behind her, and even in the dusk he saw the white terror in her face. ‘It’s all right—it’s me!’ he panted, and caught her as she reached him and stumbled, and swung her past him, just as a handful of the raiders, waking to what was really happening, came yelling out of the chaos after them.

Snatching one backward glance, he turned behind her, Dog racing leashed at his side, and together they hurled themselves across the street into the shadows opposite. A narrow alley-way opened to them, and they tore down it, then swerved right into another. They were in the street of metal-workers now, and squat forge chimneys rose along the way, dark and fireless against the sky; and they swung left again into a tangle of mean streets, just as the first of the hunters burst howling into the far end of the street behind them.

After that they lost all count of time or distance. It was like being hunted through the twisting ways of a nightmare; streets that seemed to stretch out to infinity with no cover in them, and the shells of the ruined houses crowding close to stare down at them with blind eyes as they ran; and always the yammer of the hunt behind. But Owain, who was choosing the way, knew every gap and short cut and dark corner of Viroconium now, as well as the girl did, and soon the dusk would be thick enough to cover them; and darting and turning and twisting in their tracks like hares, the time came when the cry of the hunt grew fainter and seemed to lose purpose behind them. And they knew that for the moment, at all events, they had shaken off their pursuers.

They were in the garden of a big house when they stopped to listen and draw breath. It was full dusk by now; the clouds were racing bat-winged overhead, and the rising wind was hushing among the dark masses of holly and juniper, driving the first chill drops of rain before it. And from the town, seemingly from two or three quarters at once, came the distant sounds of the hunt questing to and fro, faintly querulous like hounds that had lost the scent, while from the direction of the Forum they could make out other shouts and the lowing of cattle where men were still rounding up the scattered herd. Owain was catching great gasps of air, and as the drubbing of his heart quietened, he heard Regina’s quick panting breaths like those of a little hunted animal. But even as he listened, it seemed to him that the sounds of the hunt were drawing nearer, and in the same instant Regina gave a terrified gasp. ‘They’re coming this way!’

He reached out his free hand and caught hers. He knew that she could not run much more, and they were a long way now from any of the gates. ‘Come!’ he whispered. ‘Up to the house. Better cover among the ruins.’

She gave a little sob of exhaustion, but turned instantly to follow his pull.

It was hard to run with both arms cumbered, but he knew that if he let go of Regina she probably wouldn’t make the house at all, and he could not risk Dog turning back to give battle on his own account. So he struggled on, desperately, his heart bursting against his ribs. It seemed a mile, though in truth it was not much more than a spear-throw, before they were panting against the half wall of a colonnade from which most of the little painted columns had fallen; and as they checked there, the sounds of the hunt swept nearer behind them. ‘Over the wall and get round to the back!’ Owain gasped. He thrust Regina over the fallen debris, scrambling after her. The house doorway gaped before them and they stumbled in over the jagged remains of the door timbers, groped their way through the tangle of the fallen upper storey, found another door and came out into the ruins of the slaves’ quarters and outbuildings behind. The first rain was spattering on the dry pavement as they checked again to listen and look about them.

They were in a narrow courtyard, at the far end of which a hawthorn tree leaned drunkenly across the broken wall that shut out the street. Owain saw it jaggedly outlined against the last stormy brightness of the west, and knew that they were in the house of Ulpius Pudentius who had once thrown a copper coin at Regina to buy her off from braying after him in the street.

Close beside them some steps led down into the ruined stoke-house, where in the old days a slave had tended the hypocaust fire. It was all overgrown now with brambles and the wreck of last autumn’s wild convolvulus. ‘Wait,’ Owain ordered, and letting go Regina’s hand, stumbled down the steps and ducked under the fallen beam that leaned slantwise at the bottom. Other debris had fallen across it, but the beam had held it up, and there was a small triangular gap left, filled with the blackness under the house floor. Bad air came from it, cold and dank, and he had no means of knowing how secure the beam was. Maybe they were going to be buried alive, but it was no time to be thinking of ‘maybe’. Next instant he was out again and reaching up for Regina’s hand. ‘We can get under the house floor—the hypocaust—Come!’

He thrust her past him through the dark hole under the beam, and pushed Dog after her, then turned to draw the brambles and dead convolvulus stalks across the betraying entrance, and paused an instant, listening. He thought the voices of the hunt sounded fainter again, but that might be only the spattering of the rain and the walls of the house, blanketing sound. Then he worked his own way in, backwards on his stomach, pulling the last bramble spray across as he did so.

A little grey light filtered through the tangle, but when he pushed himself further back and turned about, the blackness was like a tangible substance pressed against his eyes. Dog was licking his face as though he had not seen him for a month, and he reached out, groping into the dark beyond him, and found Regina crouching where the narrow passage-way opened out under the floor. ‘Go forward,’ he whispered, ‘right forward as far as we can away from the opening.’ And they felt their way on, between the squat pillars of the hypocaust, until at last they came to the blank wall of the house’s foundation, and there was no further to go.

Nothing to do now but crouch in the wolf-dark, stretching one’s ears for any sound of the hunt from the world above. Better to lie down really, because if you sat up you found the floor above pressing on the back of your neck, and that somehow made it seem more like being in a trap. Beside him, Regina was pouring out her story in a sobbing whisper. ‘They must have been cattle-raiding into the Saxon lands, and they—I suppose they came because the Forum was somewhere to pen the cattle for the night, and I crept up close to see if there were any milch cows because—I thought we might have some milk—and then someone came up behind me and caught hold of me before I could run, and he laughed and—’

‘I know; I was there,’ Owain whispered back.

‘I guessed it was you that stampeded the cattle.’

‘Regina—’ he was not really listening to her, ‘Regina, they were British, weren’t they? Not Saxon?’

‘They shouted to each other in our tongue. I know because I understood them.’

‘Yes, that’s what I thought. British gone wild, like dogs that run away to hunt in the woods.’ Owain felt clammily sick. To be here in the dark hiding from Saxon raiders was no more than physical danger; to be here hiding from one’s own kind, broken men turned wolf pack, was a hideous thing, an uncleanness like leprosy. ‘Don’t talk any more,’ he whispered. ‘We don’t know how sound carries under here, and anyhow I want to listen.’

But listening did not tell them much, here under the ground, and when once or twice they did catch a sound from the outside world it always came from the direction of the entrance hole, because that was the easiest point at which sound could enter. Once Dog whimpered, and Owain, his hand on the hound’s neck, felt the tremors running through his body, and wondered if danger was nearer than it seemed. But it did not feel quite like the quivering tension of the war-dog who smells the enemy; something else—another kind of uneasiness that he did not understand … At last, bidding Regina to stay where she was, he crept back towards the stoke-hole, Dog belly-slithering beside him. It was not easy to find the opening now, for dusk had deepened into night, and there was no gleam of paleness filtering through the debris until he was close upon it. But he found it again in a little, and crouched there, his hand on Dog’s collar, listening.

Far off, through the rain, he heard the intermittent lowing of a cow from the Forum, and that was all. The raiders must have given up the chase and returned to their fire and the cattle and whatever shelter there was to be found among the ruined Forum shops. Probably they would be gone at first light, for even though they had killed all the folk on the one farm it would not pay to linger on the way with raided cattle, and meanwhile, to hunt a girl through the streets was a thing that belonged to the hot blood of the moment; now that they had abandoned the hunt they would not return to it again. He drew a long breath of relief, but settled down to keep watch for a while, all the same.

It was some while later that he heard Regina calling him: ‘Owain!—Owain!’ in a whisper that seemed straining to burst free of her throat into the most dreadful scream.

‘W
HAT
is it? I’m coming,’ he whispered back. ‘I’m coming, Regina,’ and ducking round, he began to feel his way back with frantic haste, through the blackness towards where he had left her.

And all the while she kept up that little frozen call: ‘Owain!
Owain!’
as though in that way she were clinging to him by a kind of life-line to save herself from some horror.

‘It is all right! Hold on, whatever it is. I’m
coming—
I’m almost there.’ He blundered into one of the hypocaust pillars, hurting his shoulder, scrabbled his way past it, and reaching out into the blackness that pressed against his eyeballs, found Regina’s skinny arm with the lank masses of her hair tumbling over it. ‘I’m here. Nobody’s hurting you. What is it?’

‘Make a light,’ she whispered. ‘A light—a light—!’ It was almost a wail.

Owain hesitated, but the flash of the strike-a-light could scarcely betray them down here, even if there was someone quite close by, and the horror in Regina’s voice could not be denied. He felt for the little leather bag at his belt, and fumbled out the flint and iron pyrites, a dry twig and the whisp of scorched grass he used for tinder. He got his first sparks quickly, and in the instant’s tiny glow before they went out, saw Regina crouched against the wall staring straight before her with wide terrified eyes, and almost touching her knee, the bones of a human foot—just the bones, with nothing over them. Then the sparks went out.

Regina made a dry sound in her throat. And Owain, with a sudden feeling of suffocation, heard his own voice, shaking. ‘Don’t be afraid, he can’t hurt you. I’m getting the light again.’ His fingers were working frantically at the strike-a-light, made clumsy by his desperate urgency; spark followed useless spark, but he got the tinder to catch at last, and dipped the dry twig into it. A little clear tongue of flame sprang up and in the uncertain gleam of light he saw the skeleton of a man huddled, half lying, into the angle of the wall. It was still partly covered by the rags of a fine woollen tunic, and clutched against it by the delicate fan of bones that was one hand, was a leather bag. It was a little open, and something had spilled out from it. Something that gleamed faintly on the floor; and holding the light lower, Owain saw a scatter of coins, thick-furred with dust, but still showing at their edges a thin rind of gold.