The Devil’s Highway. Gregory Norminton

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