The Devil’s Highway

1

Blueface

They worked in the byre by torchlight. In the stalls the cow bellowed. Andagin feared she would wake their father, who had succumbed to sleep like a warrior to his wounds.

‘I looked for it,’ he said, ‘where I left it on the heath.’

‘You mistook the place.’

‘No.’

‘The wind carried it off.’

‘My cord was strong. She unfastened it. That means spring will come.’

‘Spring always comes.’ Judoc buried his fork in straw and dung. ‘Corn dolls are for children.’

‘But Ma says –’

‘Ma says.’ Judoc’s voice was fierce but he took care to whisper: ‘Will you stay her whelp for ever or would you become a man?’

Andagin felt the heat rise in his face. ‘Do not call me whelp.’

‘Why not? You whine like one. We need strong gods. Male gods like Taran. Thunder, not Earth. There – enough shovelling for me.’

They contemplated the steaming baskets. Judoc’s face was hard to read for the torch burning behind it.

‘Forgive me,’ he said, ‘for barking at you. But dreams will not save us.’ He pulled Andagin into his arms and held him. He reeked of sweat and damp wool. ‘Be strong,’ said Judoc, and releasing Andagin he hoisted a basket to his midriff. Then he was gone.

Andagin patted the cow’s hot flank. Taking the torch, he left the byre and walked into a weeping wind.

Snowflakes clung like burrs to his cloak and the stung tips of his eyelids. Winter searched for every rent in his gear. After the smoke and fug of the hut, after his father’s nightlong coughing, the cold was welcome, a familiar enemy. Andagin contemplated the shuddering pelt of the heath. He pissed into the heather, expectorated as Judoc had taught him – a lusty hoick into the wind. He returned to the sorrow of the hut.

His mother was up and doing. He ducked out from under her tousling hand and sat beside the fire, where Nyfain greeted him with her habitual scowl.

‘Where’s your brother gone? Back to his pack again?’

Andagin shrugged. To think about last night’s shouting made his heart clench. He watched Nyfain’s fingers weave a basket of heather stems.

‘Will you patch my cap for me?’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘It has a hole.’

‘You made the hole.’

She was angry because Judoc was missing. Were he near she would have been no happier.

‘The snow will get in.’

His cousin huffed and pulled the cap off his head. She inspected it and pushed a little finger through the gap. He watched her reach for the bone needle she kept and some thread.

‘Will you be wheedling all morning or have you things to do? Now that your brother’s at the hole game with his idiot friends.’

‘There’s no playing in winter.’

‘Men are always at play.’

His mother reached down a bundle of mugwort from the rafters and tossed it into the fire. The medicinal fumes filled the hut and Nyfain’s scowl tightened, for she hated the smell, though she knew better than to complain of it.

‘You will be trapping again,’ his mother said as she handed Andagin the pot of gruel.

When he had eaten his share and a mouthful of heather honey, he crawled to the bench and felt under it for his shoulder pack. His fingers found the arrows he stowed there: antler tips that Judoc had carved for him, back in the summer, before the strangeness took him.

‘Vala. Vala.’

‘Hush.’

‘He’s out again.’ The coughing was long and liquid. ‘Those hotheads …’

‘Drink this and lie quiet.’

Andagin took up his bow. He looked to where his father lay, hoping for a glance, a raised hand – some gesture that still had blood in it.

He left the hut disappointed.

To the east the cloud was stained with light. He bathed his gaze in it as he shrugged the pack more comfortably onto his shoulders. He sorted mentally through the contents. The knife was there. Some water in a gourd. Cordage. Her stone. He sensed, as if it were an old dog watching him, the hill fort at his back. He did not have to look at the smoking thatch and dilapidated fencing; he knew the talismans hooked on what had been battlements, wooden heads to keep evil spirits at bay. Andagin had rarely entered the fort. He knew only the cattle enclosure where livestock and brides were bartered, and the open field hedged with gorse where the dead were returned to the sky. There was also, forbidden to him and to all males, the shrine where his mother went to give him life, where Judoc was born and two others that never drew breath.

He thought about the dead babies. He could picture them only as dolls for an offering. ‘She took them back,’ his mother said. ‘You must not be angry. She can take, for without Her we would have nothing to give.’

Andagin recited the story. He did it so that the dead might lie easy.

Long ago, when the world was young, there was nothing but forest from sea to sea. The sea was blue and the land was green, a sea of leaf and wood. There were many wolves and bears in the forest and men were their prey – for men could not find their way in the shadows and they never saw the face of the sun. One day our Mother took pity on men and sent a great wind to open up the forest. In the clearings made by fallen trees, corn and barley grew and heather for cattle to browse – and into these places men stumbled, giving thanks to she who had lifted the darkness. So to this day we worship our Mother for her mercy, and leave her corn dolls and a knot from the first sheaf. And we tread lightly on her mantle, for she is our parent that loves us, and will return us to life when our lives come to an end.

The hill fort burrowed out of sight. Andagin tracked south through croplands, praying to the hare that might sacrifice itself, to the woodcock and the fox. His belly was full only of hunger. He was sick of cutting the pith and seed from rosehips, of watery soup and stale hazelnuts.

Deep heather gathered like a rampart. He shook spumes of snow from its dead flowers.

He waded a mile towards the oak wood.

His first snare was untouched – rope taut and sapling flexed as he had left them. The same sight awaited him at the next. A third had a squirrel snared about the midriff. Death and the cold had stiffened it. Pink haws of blood lay in the snow where it had struggled.

Andagin untied the squirrel. Mere scraps, yet he gave it thanks for giving what it had. He inspected the russet fur to assess its condition. He took off his pack and extracted the cordage. He trimmed off a length with his knife and bound the squirrel by its neck to the strap of his pack. He swung the pack over his shoulder, feeling the sway of the corpse behind him.

He inspected his fourth snare at the woodland edge and found that one of the nooses had come undone. He set to replacing it and soon his eyes were so fused to the running knot, his mind so bound up with it, that it took a gasp to break his concentration and name that shape as it burst, in a spatter of snow, from cover.

A hare. Sprinting to close open ground. Passing so near he fancied he could see the ember of its soul rushing to catch up with it.

Andagin’s heart pounced and his body followed. Already the bow was in his left hand, an arrow in the right, its flights crushed between his fingers and the haft.

The hare was quick – it leapt into a bank of heather. Andagin watched for tremors that might break the crust of snow. He began, with arrow poised, to close in on its hiding place. He let his feet do the thinking. Snow and brittle winter grass creaked beneath him. Closer each step, his eyes bridging the heather and the blunt tip of his arrow. It was like a raindrop on the edge of a leaf – at any instant the bond would break. Now. Or now. He trailed his foot in the snow. He stamped the ground.

The hare broke cover. It bolted and his arrow followed. He was in that flight. He felt it strike and the hare leapt as if the ground were a snake rearing up to bite.

The hare was not dead but knocked awry. Andagin gave chase, the animal in his chest hammering against its cage of bone. The hare stumbled, thwarted by a modest bank of earth. He saw, or thought he saw, the white blizzard of its terror as he fell upon it.

He was in the snow, his arms full of kicking muscle and tendons and fur. He managed to kneel and the snow was churned up and there was blood in it. He gripped the hare between his knees; more than its teeth, he feared those amber eyes. He hooded them with his hands and wrenched up and sideways. The hare shuddered. Andagin shut his eyes and swallowed his cry of triumph lest it spoil the gift.

He contemplated the hare in his lap. The light passed out of it. It was his duty to witness this, and not merely in beasts. He recalled the efforts of his aunt to be gone, the fever-light sharp in her eyes when he was brought to tell her goodbye. She had tried to touch his face and he remembered Judoc’s grip on his nape preventing him from shying away.

Other deaths were not to be witnessed. His grandfather had walked one frozen night into the heath. Men found the corpse and took it to the hill fort for burning. Andagin had wept at the flames, though his mother told him that life had two gates and both led into the world.

Was this true? Had he walked the heath before as another? Would he again? He poked with his finger at the dead hare. If only he could see its spirit run on into the heather. Into the earth, like a seed in darkness to germinate there and rise again.

His father would cross that threshold soon. Andagin would have to keep his face strong as they lit a pyre in the place of ancestors. The lintel of their house would fall and who but he remained to keep the other timbers from following?

His mind left the wood. It flew like a roosting crow to his father’s sickbed. He saw the ribs stark in that ruined chest. Saw his father’s roiling eyes as the coughing hacked him. And Judoc had turned against them all. Had they not been taught to walk their anger until it was spent: to shed a grievance on the heath and mark the spot of release with a stake plunged into the ground? Yet his brother disappeared for days without explanation. He seemed to crave his heart’s burden. He let the rage walk him.

Andagin squirmed the pack off his shoulders. She beckoned to him. She promised him comfort.

His fingers fastened about Her stone. He brought it to the light and held it to his nose. There was lightning locked inside. He rolled the stone in his palm to give it the heat of his body. The likeness turned to flesh against his flesh. Opening his hand and lifting the stone to his face, he traced with his thumb the indentations, the beads about her breast and crown.

She had come to him, catching his eye where she lay among dull flints. She alone among the stones had spoken.

He raised the figure to his lips and breathed on her as if stone could thaw or kindle. He knew that the likeness was a prayer in stone. His friends collected flints and some of these were thunderstones which had cooled and kept their shape. The arrows of heaven. Yet his talisman fitted his palm and was more precious, for no thundercloud had forged it. Another than him had sensed the presence within and released it from bondage. Those hands had failed or forgotten: she had been lost, or escaped, to lie in wait for another. For him. For Andagin.

The chatter of fieldfare returned him to the day. Last snowflakes drifted like white bees above the heather. He stowed the stone in the pack, slung the hare over his shoulder and followed his bow into the wood.

Alone for a spell – a breath of respite – Marcus Severus stood on the battlements and contemplated the day. Snow still fell in gusts, yet the bronze disc of the sun was attempting a breakthrough and where, to the south, it had burned a breach in the cloud, the stubble-pricked snowfields and frozen dykes gleamed.

It was a relief, after weeks of leaden skies, to see light again. Saturnalia was past, the worst of the darkness with it, yet this supposedly temperate island creaked in winter’s vice. Marcus felt the cold in every inch of his being. Stamping his boots and slapping his biceps, he turned to survey the orderly grid of leather ridge tents and, beyond these, the bedraggled huts, the random smoke and disorder of the natives. A useless tribe, his superiors said: obstinate, dull-witted and indolent. Yet they had built long ago the earthworks above which he stood and the foundations of a city to come. Signs of progress were everywhere. Already, beyond the young orchards and cleared scrub, the circle of an amphitheatre had been scored into the earth. Posted as he was above the east gate, the decurion could send his eye along the straight flight of the new road.

‘You’ll get the measure of the place,’ his commanding officer had said as they dressed in the unfinished bathhouse. ‘It’s all rain and thistles. They boil mutton till it tastes like old boot. And don’t look for action in these parts. They’ve been tame for a hundred years.’

Aulus Pomponius Capito had been with the Legion when the rebel queen was vanquished. Four months into his posting, Marcus could not counter with similar experience. Aquitaine had been a soft province, yet he knew that country folk altered little with the climate. He was familiar with gossip and low cunning, the superstition that knitted fertility dolls from wheat stalks and hung the corpses of crows from the branches of wayside trees. He was a countryman himself, as the centurion never tired of reminding him:

‘To a wheat weevil like you, this heath must look blasted. Its dismal hills. Its useless soil. A wet desert.’

‘In winter, perhaps –’

‘You’ve not lived through summer here. It so pelts with rain your feet start to rot. I’ve never waded through mud like I did last year.’

Marcus had learned all he cared to about the suppression of the revolt, yet he listened with every semblance of interest to his superior’s account of the horrors that met the Legion: the noblewomen with their severed breasts sewn into their mouths, the veterans skewered in their fields as offerings to a savage god. Aulus Pomponius described, with relish, how the insurgents used barbed arrows to increase the difficulty of extraction, how they daubed the points with grease and animal blood and wrapped the shafts with fibres to contaminate a wound.

‘Savage bastards. Wiping them out was a joy for us, like killing horseflies. I tell you, it’s a good thing their cunt of a queen did herself in. There wasn’t a soldier in Britain who wouldn’t have taken his turn with her till her guts ruptured …’

Alone on the rampart, Marcus shook the centurion from his thoughts. He noticed that he had failed to scrape a smear of mud from his ankle and was bending to rub it off when he saw, through a lattice of stairs and crossing points, his servant in the forecourt.

Condatis climbed the steps, watching that he spilled nothing from his bowls and flagon.

Marcus took his breakfast and Condatis began to prise open oyster shells with his knife.

‘I have been admiring our road.’ His servant looked up, attempting to gauge what was required of him. ‘It is not like your sandy paths. Your wayfarer routes that twist and turn.’

‘My people,’ said Condatis, ‘do not see as yours do. We are not so here to there. We turn,’ he said and, defeated by language, traced a snail’s shell in the air.

The veins showed blue beneath the man’s pale skin. He was lean and wiry; the grey hairs on his scalp were too sparse to be limewashed into a warrior’s mane. He handed over the shucked oysters.

‘My nurse used to warn me about your people. She liked to frighten me with tales of the dreaded Keltoi who once sacked Rome.’

‘Long ago,’ said the Briton in his own tongue. The decurion had learned enough of it to understand. It was hard to square the horrors of the uprising with this mild man. Marcus regarded that bowed head. The dwelling-place of the soul. To take a head in battle was to possess the soul of one’s enemy – did they not believe that?

‘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

No Man’s Land

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.