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Lord’s hound, and my Lord feeds me from his own table.’
    The Emperor, turning again in his chair, one hand out to the wine-flask, caught Justin’s fascinated and puzzled gaze on the little man, and said with that straight, wide-lipped smile of his, ‘The High King of Erin has his Druth, his Household Fool, and should the third-part Emperor of Rome lack what the High King of Erin has?’
    Cullen nodded, eating raisins and spitting the pips into the fire. ‘Wherefore my Lord Curoi bought me from the slavers up yonder on the coast of the Western Sea, that he might not lack what the High King of Erin has in his Halls at Tara;—and also, it is in my mind, because I was from Laighin, even as my Lord. And I have been my Lord’s hound these seven summers and winters past.’ Then, spinning over and coming to his knee in a single kingfisher flash of movement, he took from his belt the instrument that Justin had noticed before.
    Sitting cross-legged now beside the fire, while above him the talk drifted on to other matters, he tipped the thing with a curious flick of the wrist, and a kind of ripple of bell-notes ran from the smallest apple at the tip to the greatest just above the thick enamelled handle and up again, in a minor key. Then, very quietly, and clearly for his own pleasure, he began to play—if playing it could be called, for there was no tune, only single notes, falling now soft, now clear, as he flicked each silver apple with knuckle or nail; single notes that seemed to fall from a great height like shining drops distilled out of the emptiness, each perfect in itself.
    It was a strange evening; an evening that Justin never forgot. Outside, the beat of the wind and the far-down boom of the sea, and within, the scent of burning logs, the steady radiance of the lamps, and the stains of quivering coloured light cast upon the table by the wine in its iridescent flasks. He held his hand in one such pool, to see it splashed with crimson and emerald and living peacock-blue; and wondered suddenly whether these wonderful flasks, whether Carausius’s great gold cup and the hangings of thick Eastern embroideries that shut off the end of the room, and the coral-studded bridle-bit on the wall behind him, had all known the hold of a black-winged Saxon longship. Outside, the wild wings and the voices of the storm; and within, the little flames flickering among the logs, and facing each other around the table, Flavius and himself and the little thick-set seaman who was Emperor of Britain; while the strange slave Cullen sprawled hound-wise beside the fire, idly touching the apples of his Silver Branch.

    It had been for little more than a despot’s whim, Justin knew, that Carausius had dismissed his escort and ordered the two of them to ride with him instead; but far down within him he knew also that after this evening, though they never met again like this, there would be something between them that was not usually between an Emperor and two of his most junior officers.
    Yes, a most strange evening.
    Carausius had most of the talk, as was fitting, while the two young men sat with their cups of watered wine before them, and listened. And indeed it was talk worth listening to, for Carausius was not merely an Emperor, he had been a Scaldis river pilot, and the commander of a Roman Fleet, a Centurion under Carus in the Persian War, and a boy growing up in Laighin, three days south from Tara of the Kings. He had known strange places, and done strange things, and he could talk of them so that they came to life for his hearers.
    And then, as though suddenly tired of his own talk, he rose and turned to the curtained end of the room. ‘Ah, but I have talked enough of yesterday. I will show you a thing that is for today. Come here, both of you.’
    Chairs rasped on the tesserai, and Justin and Flavius were close at his shoulder as he flung back the hangings glimmering with peacock and pomegranate colours, and passed through. Justin, the