‘Rome’s past is your past,’ Marcus said in the language of Rome. ‘Do you not think it a glorious heritage to have come so close to the seat of your enemy?’
‘My people are herders. We know nothing of old wars.’
‘That is deftly spoken. Rome’s peace will absorb your people. Our gods were the vanguard. Is not your Taranis our Jupiter in a local guise? And your Camulos is, I think, no match for our Mars.’
Marcus contemplated his manservant. There was strength in that leanness. Would he be of use as a guide in the hunt? Aulus Pomponius had plans to stir the blood by spilling some.
‘Do you hunt, Condatis?’
‘Hunt?’
Marcus spoke the local word – or what he took it to be.
The tribesman blanched. ‘The killing days are over.’
‘You misunderstand. I mean for meat. Hunting beasts.’
Marcus hesitated. A local’s sense of the land might help but not, perhaps, the local reverence for brute nature. It was good to set one’s wits against a quarry – to boast over its flesh as if in victory. Why speak softly to a carcass, why thank its spirit that had none?
‘What sort of man was your father?’
‘A good man, sir. He died when I was young.’
‘Was he a religious man?’ Again, that muted bewilderment. ‘Did he fear the gods?’
‘Who does not fear the gods?’
‘And the wild places, did he revere them? I have heard of a British man who ran mad when the Legion felled a grove of oaks.’
‘I know nothing of this.’
‘No, you are very tactful.’
Condatis had put on a cape of evasion. Marcus regretted his interrogation and wanted to share something of himself, to make a peace offering. ‘My father is still alive. As far as I know. His trade is tableware. He sells to ambitious men who want their wealth to speak for itself.’ The Briton nodded, secure in his deferential burrow. ‘My brother stands to inherit the foundry and the business. I have soldiering. Perhaps it will keep me here, in your country.’
‘It is your country now.’
Ah, thought Marcus, I have lured you out. ‘Well, I will be pensioned off to fatter pastures. In the midlands, no doubt, where I shall dig turnips until another uprising finishes me off.’ He sensed his servant weighing these words, sifting them for a nugget of intention.
‘When that time comes,’ the Briton said, ‘perhaps you will consider my services.’
Marcus felt his lips open and close. ‘Perhaps,’ he managed to reply.
Condatis bowed and took back the breakfast vessels. Marcus watched him withdraw, negotiating with hands full the narrow wooden steps to the camp.
A raven cronked from one of the granary towers. Marcus looked for it through the smoke and growing clamour of the settlement. He noticed that the snow had stopped falling. It would be a bright day for once; all the better because unlooked for. A blessing.
2
She realises only after she has woken that she did so braced for the smell of smoke on her pillow. The bedroom is hot and whiffy like a sickroom in summer, and the heavy curtains admit a sliver of breeze in which she expects, almost avidly, the scent of wildfire.
She lies on her back, looking at the spines of Polish thrillers on the bookshelves. Shutting her eyes, she wills sleep to reclaim her, but she is cut adrift and washed ashore on another day.
She gets up from the hardness of the bed and pulls back the curtains. A bright morning, another one, the sky pale blue and slashed with contrails. She fights with the stiff latch and lurches out –
– blossom and earth and cut grass. The neighbour leaning on the frame of his lawnmower. No smoke, at least not yet. She pads to the bathroom, pees, then goes downstairs. In the kitchen she finds a note folded and propped up against one of her grandfather’s ashtrays.
Gone out on fire watch! Dad xx
She stares at the words as if she expects them to rearrange themselves on the paper. He has left her again to her homework and the heavy tutting of the kitchen clock.
Bobbie slouches, slack-bellied, at the sink and looks out at the garden. The oaks are naked but elsewhere it’s leaf-burst, the beech and chestnuts incandescent with spring. What her father calls the green mist. He wrote about it for the book he was working on before Mum left, before they came to Bagshot these Easter holidays to sort through fifty years of stuff – files, folders, clothes, books, pictures, furniture, garden tools, dusty junk in the garage. She wanders into the sitting room, barefoot on the worn carpet, and contemplates the cardboard boxes left open and gaping. When her father isn’t filling these with his inheritance – though some are marked ‘Mum’, ‘Roberta’, ‘Dump’ – he is out on the heath. Why should she wait for him if he cannot be bothered to greet her when she rises? It’s not as if there are DVDs to watch, or music worth listening to in her grandfather’s record collection.
Bobbie returns to the kitchen. She pulls the dry loaf from the bread bin, hacks at it with the breadknife and fills the ticking toaster. Her friends will be playing in their North Oxford gardens. They will be cycling in University Park or going shopping with their mums. She has no one to hang out with. Only the Lost Boys. She imagines the heat coming off the sand on the Poors Allotment. Waiting for her toast, she pictures the journey – imagines setting herself against the hill, the soil clenching beneath her boots.
A sunburst – a flashbulb going off in his face – and the air pulses. The noise is a giant punching him in both ears. Then (but there is no sequence, it’s all now) the hot splash of shrapnel. He lies on the ground with the high, shocked whine in his ears. He feels but cannot hear the patter of dust falling. Someone is screaming.
He is on his back, waving his legs in the air to restrict blood flow. His heart isn’t so much pounding as taking one. Air escapes his lungs –
– ah!
He’s in bed.
He’s in bed. He eases himself down and the sheets are damp with sweat. He focuses on his breathing – in through the nostrils, out through the mouth. Something catches in his throat and he hacks it loose, trying to do so quietly.
He reaches for his watch on the bedside table. 7:39. The Rev will be up, all cheery and wholesome and unfuckable in her kitchen.
He swings his legs over the side of the bed and the floor is cold and that feels good. He’s in England. He’s almost home. Almost back.
Ten minutes and a crafty fag later, he is dressed and kitted out at the breakfast table. Rachel is sitting behind her second or third cup of coffee. He can see on her face how he must look – wired and worn out at the same time.
‘What’s it today?’ he asks.
‘Wednesday. Holy Communion. You’re most welcome.’
‘Na, it’s all right.’
She has left out the Rice Krispies and a sweating bottle of milk. The Rev sees but never mentions his shaking hands. She’s careful not to slam doors and to set the volume low on the radio and the television so they don’t come on with a blast. Even so, she makes mistakes. Like that time she invited him into the kitchen when there was raw