He picked up the bowl. He was ravenous, dreams scattering to windblown rags. He dipped a wooden spoon into the bowl, and finally noticed the figure on the other side of the fire.
Just another traveller, resting from the road. He was hunched over his broth, and he too had stopped, spoon in hand, to stare at Lance. He was gaunt, long-limbed. Once he must have been handsome. His cloak was ordinary, but beneath it he wore the shabby remains of a Roman army uniform. He put back his hood, and Lance found himself staring into the face of his father.
Chapter Three
“Much I gained by running away from you. The emperor Constantinus was recruiting. I met one of his generals in the east, and he hired me, along with a shipload of other poor fools who could lift a sword and had reason to leave these shores. This island’s finished, as far as Rome is concerned.”
Ban still had a fine head of fair hair. The longer Lance stared at him, the more the years dropped away, and the more he struggled to fit the familiar face to the dead-leaf words falling from its mouth. “I didn’t even know there’d been an emperor Constantinus,” Lance said, and wondered at his own stupidity. His first words to his father in four years, and he sounded like a dolt.
Ban gave him a tiny smile, as if he’d read the thought. “You wouldn’t have. He was gone before news could have reached you here—the usurper usurped, by a puppet of the Vandals called Jovinus. You won’t have heard of him either.”
“No, I haven’t. What did you do?”
“I was on the Rhine when Jovinus made his move. Jovinus looked good for a while, so I deserted, along with a lot of the other troops.”
Noble King Ban, who would once have recoiled at the thought of such treachery! He wasn’t even seeking to defend himself. Lance, who was growing up in fits and starts, leaned his elbows on his knees and suddenly found he could lift away his memories of his father from the man sitting opposite him now. Ban had been noble because Lance, as a boy, had yearned for nobility, and had thrown that longing upon him. Believed all his stories, gazed in admiration at his army cloak and sword. He’d been a kindly, easygoing father, more concerned with hunting and carousing with his friends than heroic displays of courage. None had been demanded of him, until the night of the raid. “I take it,” Lance said flatly, “that Jovinus was defeated, too.”
“By the Visigoths. They put his head on a spike outside Ravenna. The Western Empire is crumbling, Lance. That’s why Rome’s jettisoned Britannia. They’re trying to protect their heartland, but I don’t think even that can last for long.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because here you are, with a squire and two good horses, if the beasts I saw in the stables are yours. If you mean to try your fortune in the service of Rome, I caution you against it.” In the silence that followed, Ban examined his son’s face. He gave a dry chuckle. “You never could keep your heart out of your eyes, boy. Look at you, wondering what right I have to caution or command you, and too polite to open your mouth.”
“I am not too polite. You’re a stranger to me, and there’s no point, that’s all.”
Ban didn’t try to hide a flinch. “I wonder, would it help you to know how I paid for my sins? I spent three years fighting my way home across the Rhineland and Gaul. I was a soldier for hire to whichever tribe of Vandals, Franks or Visigoths would pay my wage. I laid my head in marshland villages infested with cholera, and at the end of it all I barely had the price of my food and the boat when I got back to Gaul’s northern shore.”
“And now what?”
“Now, after my travels, I hope to go home.”
“Home’s a heap of ash on the moors, for all you know.”
“No. Not for all I know. News of the rise and fall of emperors might not have reached you here, but I met a soldier in the marshes who’d travelled from Caer Lir. From him I learned that Vindolanda was still standing, thanks to a fine son of mine.” Ban held out a placating hand. “I don’t think to flatter my way to forgiveness, boy. I’m only curious. You stood by the place for all this time. Why are you leaving now?”
“To join Arthur Pendragon at Din Guardi fort.”
Ban’s eyebrows flew up. “Artorius?”
“You’ve heard of him?”
“Everyone’s heard of him by now. Old Uther’s dead. Artorius seized the crown from his claimant half-brothers last year and made a great march north, drumming up troops for his campaign against the Saxons. He’s to be married, too, I hear, so there’s great doings in hand. You’re a grand boy, Lance, a hundred times the man I’ll ever be—but what would the king want with you?”
Lance put his bowl down so Ban wouldn’t see the tremor in his hands. His last letter from Art—the worn, much-folded parchment folded in his jerkin’s inner pocket, as close to his heart as he could carry it—was more than a year old. He glanced up at Drusus, but the messenger’s face was impassive. With swift, subtle instinct, Lance understood that he mustn’t spread word of Art’s illness, that such news would reach his enemies like the scent of blood. “I’m not sure,” he said—and it was suddenly, painfully true. “Possibly he’ll want nothing. But I owe him my allegiance, and I’m going to him.” He turned to Drusus again. “Now.”
Ban held out a hand. “A moment, son.”
“I owe you no moments.”
“Agreed. It’s I who owe you. I have my cloak, and the shirt on my back, and you wouldn’t want either. But I was a soldier once, and I do have something to give you. You’ll need it, if you’re off to fight the Saxons for the king.” A smile lit Ban’s face, erasing decades. “I recall you trying it on when you were five years old, and falling down the stairs under the weight. I thought your mother was going to kill me.”
Lance sat stiffly while Ban unfastened the pack at his side. Metal jingled, and Ban took out a chainmail shirt. Lorica squamata, the soldiers called it—tiny plates of bronze sewn onto a linen backing, in a Celtic design grown old before its adoption by the Romans. “I had a newer one,” Ban continued, shaking out the shirt so that its disks glimmered dully in the firelight, “but I traded it for food on the way home. You might’ve seen ’em. Bands of metal that go all the way around you, the lorica laminata. I’m not sure they do much better in a pinch than this old thing. Stopped a few spear-tips for me, anyway.”
He held out the garment. After a pause, Lance took it. “Won’t you need it,” he asked, his voice unsteady, “if you’re travelling west? The hills are still full of Picts.”
“Nothing ever changes, eh? No, I’ll be all right. And you can go to your king with an undivided heart, because I know you’ll have torn it in two to get this far.”