I was jolted awake by a kick to my ribs. A flickering torch showed me the wild-eyed faces of two men. They were painfully thin, with mangy tufts of hair on their heads. I recognised the two kiln-slaves who had been tending the fire earlier.
‘Abi!’ They were shouting. ‘Abi!’
They pointed out into the darkness.
‘I’m not doing any harm,’ I mumbled in English. ‘It’s the middle of the night. Just let me stay here till morning.’
‘Abi!’ insisted the one with the torch, and swung his foot in the direction of my ribs.
I rolled away and then pulled out my knife. That made them both jump back.
But the one with the torch kept saying, ‘Abi!’ and jabbing the flaming end of his stick at me.
I pulled myself to my feet too quickly; a sudden dizziness swept over me. I leaned against the warm cone of the kiln to steady myself.
I tried to remember the Latin phrase I had memorised.
But they only shouted, ‘Abi!’ and the one without a torch gestured as if swatting a fly. I remembered Solomon Daisy’s warning about misunderstanding gestures, but I was pretty certain this one meant, ‘Beat it!’
I sighed and used my knife to point into the darkness. ‘Londinium?’ I asked.
‘Abi!’ they repeated together. ‘Abi!’
‘All right, all right,’ I muttered.
Once out of the circle of torchlight, I put my knife back in my belt of plaited rag. The night was full of frogs croaking. The air was mild but damp, with a swampy smell. It was so dark that I hardly dared to move. I just stood there on waste ground, afraid of what I might step on.
After a while I sat down. There were sharp pieces of broken pottery scattered around, but I pushed them away and finally curled up on damp earth.
I longed for my own bed and my duvet or even the stupid hippy bedspread my gran had made when she was at university. I tried different positions but couldn’t fall asleep. The croaking of the frogs was too loud. I heard ducks quacking too. There was also a bird with a call like a squeaky toy, maybe a coot. I never knew the night could be so noisy.
Finally I rolled onto my back and opened my eyes.
The sky was full of more stars than I had ever seen in my life.
There were a trillion of them, blazing like diamonds. I could clearly see the brighter stars that made up constellations and also a band of stars so crammed together that they formed a big curve of light, like a diamond rainbow.
I had seen the Milky Way once before, on holiday in Greece. It was impressive then, but nothing like this. This was literally awesome.
The croaking frogs seemed to be singing out the message of those stars: We are here! The universe is vast. We are eternal.
And I realised something. Those terrifying stars are always there, but we don’t see them any more.
I was hypnotised.
It felt like they wanted to pull part of me into them. Like I was falling upward.
I thought, This is a dream. I’m going to wake up any minute.
But it was too real to be a dream. The swampy air was too heavy and the frogs were too loud and the stars were too bright.
What had I done? I would never find my way back and my gran wouldn’t know what had happened to me and she would worry for the rest of her life.
I stared up at those stars for a long time. Eventually I must have fallen asleep, because I woke with a jerk to the sound of a mosquito whining in my ear.
The awe-inspiring stars had been replaced by a colourless pre-dawn sky. Mist blanketed the ground around me.
I sat up, rubbed sleep from my eyes. Mosquitoes were swarming around my legs. I had already been bitten several times.
I pushed myself up on my knees. Strangely, I didn’t feel hungry. Just dizzy.
Then I nearly screamed. A huge hole yawned in the ground only a few paces away. Craning forward I saw that it was a rubbish pit, full of jagged shards of pottery, the corpse of a dead rat and other disgusting things. If I’d kept walking in the dark I would have fallen in and probably broken my neck.
At least I had survived the night.
I slapped at a mosquito and hoped it wasn’t a malaria carrier.
It was now light enough for me to see the flat grey shapes of people and animals moving through the low mist about a stone’s throw from where I sat. They were all heading in one direction. North-east, I think. Some had baskets on their backs or sacks full of goods. A few had little donkeys. A slow-moving ox-cart trundled along at the same pace as the pedestrians. It held a giant leather sack full of liquid, like an ancient tanker truck.
I stood up and waited for another wave of dizziness to pass. Carefully going around the death pit, I picked my way through weeds and pottery shards to the road. Another ox-cart passed by, this one piled high with chopped firewood. A man in a tattered tunic had a big dog on a lead. For some reason the dog suddenly yelped and bolted. His tattered owner ran after him. A barefoot man wearing a woolly hat and something like a big nappy was driving a herd of small pigs with a stick. The pigs also seemed restless and started to squeal, so I waited for them to pass before I stepped out onto the road.
When I say ‘road’, I mean a kind of sticky river of mud studded with gravel. There were no trees at all, apart from a single dead one up ahead, a silhouette in the mist. To my right were marshy grasses and big puddles of water reflecting the rising sun. I noticed small tombs either side of the road and realised this must be a burial ground. Smoke was rising up from a bonfire, and as I got closer I heard music and saw about thirty men, women and children standing around it with their hands lifted.
The swirling smoke made them look like ghosts and I shuddered. They were even moaning in a spooky way, making a sound like nothing I’d ever heard. Flutes trilled and someone was shaking a tambourine or maybe some kind of rattle. It was unearthly.
Then I realised it wasn’t a bonfire.
It was a dead body being burned on a pyre.
A gust of wind wafted smoke across the road and the travellers on the road started coughing. I got a noseful of it too. My empty stomach flipped as I smelled something like incense mixed with bacon.
A little firewood-laden donkey stopped and began to make an incredibly loud hee-haw noise. Its owner started beating it with a stick, but it wouldn’t move.
He stood there, hitting it again and again.
I couldn’t bear to watch so I hurried on, hoping to put the death and misery behind me.
Then I saw the guy on the cross.