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gravestones, which were always the first things one met outside a town, were each side of the road now. They were dark with rain, and the first fallen yellow leaves of the poplar trees lay wet against their feet. He passed the turf banks of the Amphitheatre, and then the double arch of the South Gate was before him, with the road leading through. There were no guards at the Gate. The walls looked much as usual save for a reddish stain spreading up one bastion that might have been the scar of fire; but as Owain, his chin still tucked down and the weary hound at his heels, trudged in through the archway and his padding footsteps turned hollow in the enclosed space, they sounded like footsteps in a house that is empty and hearth-cold.
    He had passed two farms burnt out and deserted, that day. That should have warned him. But he had refused to understand what their blackened ruins meant; he had said to himself, ‘It was a chance raid, no more,’ and pushed on, with the dread that he would not look at thrust into the back of his mind.
    There were no bodies piled within the Gate, no signs of a struggle that he could see. The townsfolk must have known that the Saxons were coming, and lacking their fighting men, fled in time. And the Barbarians, flooding into an empty town, had looted and burned to their fierce hearts’ delight. Owain wandered on down the straight street towards the Forum, aimlessly, because he had got to the place he was making for and found it dead, and there was nowhere else to go. And as he drifted along, he looked about him.
    Viroconium had been half empty when he came that way before. It had been falling into decay for a hundred years, becoming slowly sleepier and more unkempt, the grass and the little dusty shepherd’s purse creeping further out from the sides of the streets. But there had still been life in Viroconium when Kyndylan’s war-host had gathered in the spring; voices and footsteps in the streets, and children playing on doorsteps, and smells of cooking towards evening. Now, the city was dead. The streets were silent, and the houses stood up gaunt and gutted, with blind eyes and blackened roof-beams fallen in.
    Owain found himself at the Forum Gate, with its proud inscription to the Emperor Hadrian, and halted there, staring dazedly about him, while Dog stood watching him expectantly and wagging his tail. It was growing dusk, and he thought suddenly—it was a thought that made the sick laughter rise in his throat—that he could sleep in the Basilica tonight, he could sleep in the Palace of Kyndylan the Fair, if he chose; he was free of all Viroconium. But the little low-browed shops in the Forum colonnade seemed to offer a deeper and darker refuge to crawl into. One or two near the Gate still had their roofs on them, and he turned to the nearest of these. It looked to have been a basket-maker’s shop; everything that could be of use to the marauders had been stripped from it, but a broken pigeon basket and a bundle of withies still lay in one corner. The light was going fast, and the back of the shop was already lost in the shadows of the rainy twilight.
    Dog, who was tired of being wet, padded in and shook himself, scattering a shower of drops from his thick brindled hide. Owain followed, dragging himself like a sorely hurt animal into the darkest corner, and lay down with his sodden cloak still about him. He lay curled in on himself and pressed against the wall behind him, his knees drawn up and his head in his arms, as though he would have shrunk away into the shadows and ceased to exist altogether if he could. He had thought that he knew it was the end of all things, in the night after the battle, but he knew now he had never quite believed it; always, all the long road north and while he lay sick of his wound, he had clung to some desperate hope that he had not really looked at; the hope that if he could only get back to Viroconium where they had hosted in the spring, there would be