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you do against the Saxon hordes?’
    ‘Even Priscus wished that he was young again and had a sword.’
    ‘Priscus is a fool.’
    ‘So am I. I have no sword, but at least I am young. I must go, Priscilla.’
    Silence hung between them, filled only with the thrum of the spindle. Then Priscilla broke it with a snort. ‘A child you are, and a fool you are, and so you must go,’ and was silent again so long that he thought she was angry. At last, quite suddenly, she laid aside spindle and distaff, and let her big hands drop into her lap. ‘There’s no more to be said. Go then, in the morning. But remember always that so long as my old Priscus and I are here, there’s a place here for you, if you need it.’
    ‘I will remember,’ Owain said. ‘And maybe I will come back one day, and maybe not. But either way, I will always remember.’



4
Shadow on the Wall
    N EXT morning, so early that the hillside was still in shadow, Owain set out again for Viroconium.
    Priscilla had given him food and the household’s spare strike-a-light, and a good thick cloak, and Priscus had added three horse-hair snares and a good long hunting knife with a well-worn alderwood handle; and he had tried to thank them and failed completely, and whistled Dog to heel and come away. Now, as the rough hill track turned him over to the road that he had missed so long ago, he wished that he had kissed Priscilla at parting, because he thought that she would have liked it.
    But already the past weeks were growing thin and distant to him. There were plenty of other things to fill his mind. In two days he struck the great double-track frontier road, and followed it northward, keeping it in sight, but not too closely, for there was no knowing how far west the Saxons might have thrust. Dog trotted at his heel or loped on wolf-like far ahead, looking round from time to time to make sure that he was coming. It was late summer now, turning to autumn, and there were no more birds’ eggs, but he had the barley-bannocks and strong ewe-milk cheese that Priscilla had given him, and when that was gone, he had his knife and his hound and his snares, and his strike-a-light to make a fire; and they lived on the country, hunting and foraging as they went.
    For the same reason as he avoided the road, Owain kept clear of any place where men might be—and indeed the countryside seemed almost as empty of human life as the forests and marshes south of Glevum had been; and so in all that long trail north, he never heard of the Saxons, nor how things went with the rest of Britain.
    He travelled slowly, as a man must who hunts as he goes, and it was many days later when the road that he had been following along the east side of a great moorland ridge brought him out into rolling wooded lowlands, and he saw ahead of him, so far off that it seemed to have been moulded from thickened blue air, the familiar wave-lift of the Virocon, which he had seen as long as he could remember from the open end of the courtyard at home.
    That night he came down closer to the road, and found the place where Kyndylan’s war-host had encamped on their first night out. The blackened scars of their fires were still to be seen under the encroaching brambles, and he slept there with their ghosts for company, and at first light was on the road again.
    The last day of his journey started bright, with puffs of white cloud sailing across a harebell sky. But as the day went on the cloud thickened, and when at last he came in sight of Viroconium, it was raining and the Virocon rising beyond the white walls of the town seemed to have turned inwards on itself and sit brooding darkly on ancient sorrows, in its fleece of wet woods; while the Sabrina curling southward into its gorge was grey as a sword-blade, sullen and without light.
    Owain crossed the river by the paved ford, and squelched on up the last stretch of the road, his shoulders hunched and his chin driven down into the wet folds of his cloak.
    The