When the first signs of spring came to Gaul in the plover’s cry and the new sun’s kindness on the shoulders, Morag began to stir and to move beyond the stockade of the farm. At first he went only a short way, fingering a path for himself along the close-set stakes. And then at last, when the leaves began to spring and the streams to run warm, he would walk as far as a hundred paces from the house to sit and brood over his slain brother, under a little circle of stones on the slopes that led to the cliff.
The villagers, seeing him there, head bowed, his stick tracing its accustomed patterns in the sandy soil, would pass far off on the other side, murmuring a charm against the dark one, and treating him with respect. But their children, knowing he was a lord from the other Gaul, sometimes brought him gifts—plovers’ eggs and sprays of heart’s-ease and, less frequently, a stolen hen. They would lay these at his feet and run away laughing, but softly so that they should not disturb one who had known the great.
And the old woman had grown used to him by now and called him son-in-law, for no longer did the girl bother to make up two beds for them. Morag had grown to forget his mother, it seemed, and was no less ardent than the one they had found in the barn with the hole in his belly.
But Morag himself seldom spoke, only to ask for food or for the girl Myfan to come to bed. His sight was better, they could see, and now he could dress himself and even find his way across the room without falling into the fire. So everything was, in its way, stable and almost comfortable. The old woman began to forget the time when Morag was not one of the household; and as for the Romans, they did not know him—they were a dull, uninformed lot in these parts, recently posted from some flea-ridden end of the Middle Sea, and more knowledgeable about the dancing-girls of Syria than the lineage of real folk like Morag and Caradoc and, of course, the old woman, whose grandfather had carried a spear for the only real king, Cassivelaunus. . . .
Gracchus had not lasted long, after the wound he got that night, so he didn’t bother them any more. In fact, things couldn’t have turned out better, as it happened. . . . Except that sometimes Morag got restless, especially when the wind was in the south; then he began to remember names he had never mentioned before and to mumble that it was time they were getting on, or they would miss the Triumph.
At first the old woman pretended not to understand what he meant; and then even she saw that the thing must have its logical end, so she said one bright morning, “Son-in-law, there is a baggage-train going south tomorrow to the far coast. If I used my influence I might get you a seat in the wagon with the women and children. You are a strong man, and discomforts like that would mean little to you.”
And Morag, putting down his knife, and gazing at her with dull grey eyes, said, “Old woman, you catch me at the heart. That is where I want to go. And as for women and children, they are nothing to a man who cannot see them. I only know now what I touch, and if they do not touch me I shall not know them. Can I get to Rome from the far south coast?”
Then the old woman went to her bed and felt under it, and came back with a bag full of coins and pieces of broken gold that had been gorgets and lunulae.
“A ship will take you for these,” she said. “But you must promise on your lord’s word that you will come back. The girl isn’t pregnant yet, the fool, and I have a longing to start a new house of chieftains in this wind-bled part of Gaul!”
And Morag had laughed for the first time, and had pulled the girl onto the bed. “We will start now, grandmother,” he said.
But the girl had shoved him back and said, “If he goes to Rome, so do I. It’s time I saw a bit more of the real world than this spot forsaken of the gods!”
And the old woman had said, “That’s just what I thought you would say! And I shall not be sorry to see the back of both of you for a few months! When you get to my age, it’s enough to live your own life without having the stags rutting in your bedroom and groaning their way through what should be a gentle pastime every night. I need sleep, rest, nothing to disturb me. You two are worrying me to death—bringing back to me memories that I thought time had killed. Go, both of you, and be damned! But come back before the year is out. I need company when the snows begin to fall.”
And that was all the word they got from the old woman. And that was the word that the young girl wanted. But it was only the look in the warrior’s eyes that spoiled things—for now he was beginning to remember what Caradoc looked like again, and already the raw smell of the sea was in his nose, and only a wagon of the gods could have carried him to the coast fast enough.