The Shadowy Horses

"Leon Uris."

"Is that his name? He said there was no future in Ireland, only the past happening over and over. I get that feeling here, as well. The past is never far away, at Rosehill. Never far away."

Beneath his hand the cat yawned, turned staring eyes upon me for a moment, then shifted its gaze to the window. It didn't hiss, or make a sound, but the dark hair lifted all along its spine.

"You see?" said Quinnell, lightly. "Look, our Sentinel is passing."

I believe he meant it as a joke, but through the moaning of the wind I fancied that I heard the footsteps walking, walking, steadily, along the gravel drive.

XIII

David was already hard at it when I went up to the Principia on Wednesday, before breakfast. He swivelled in his chair as I came in, and his face, bathed in the hard blue light of the computer screen, looked beastly tired. "Morning," he greeted me, his jaw stiffening as he held back a yawn. He reached for the mug of coffee on the desk before him. "You're up early."

"Look who's talking." I took my own seat in the stall-cubicle opposite and hitched my chair sideways to face him. "Are you actually doing work at this ungodly hour?"

"Well, I'm not playing computer games." He seemed in good spirits this morning, relaxed. "Those are all on Adrian's machine, ken. He's got the golf and everything. Me, I'm just entering my field notes from Saturday, afore I forget what I was thinking." The blue eyes flicked me with a friendly challenge. "So what's your excuse?"

"Couldn't sleep." I thought of asking him if he had ever heard the horses running in the fields beyond, but after one more quick look at those sensible eyes, I decided against it. "Do you not teach on Wednesdays?"

He shook his dark head. “We have meetings and such, in the afternoon, but I do feel a wee cough coming on." He winked. "Anyway, Peter's been wanting to show me the things that he found when he widened the trench."

"Oh, yes. Potsherds." I fetched them from the finds room, to show him. "We found four, yesterday. I've not had much of a chance to look at them, myself, really. I'd have worked a little longer on them last night, only Peter wouldn't hear of it."

"Aye, well, he has a thing about us working late. It's like his Sunday holiday, you'll find—meant to be strictly observed by everyone but Peter himself.''

"Yes, I noticed that. He was puddling around up here on Sunday morning, but he sent me off with Jeannie. We went down to the museum."

"So I heard." He raised his coffee mug to hide the slanting smile. "Behaved herself, did she?"

His smile had distracted me. "Who, Jeannie?"

"My mother. She didn't try to bully you into helping out at the next coffee morning, or anything? No? Eh well, it's early days yet. Give her time."

I looked at him with interest. "Do they have coffee mornings?"

"Aye, on a Saturday. All the local clubs and groups hold coffee mornings him about, in the Masonic Hall. This next one coming's for the heart fund, and my mother's sure to be involved with that. You ken she had a heart attack?"

I nodded. "Jeannie told me. Very recently, was it?"

"Last July. Scared me more than it did her, I think."

"She seems to have made a full recovery," I commented. "I could barely keep up with her yesterday; she moves at a fearful pace."

"Aye, she does that." The big Scotsman's eyes held affection. "It'd take being struck by lightning to slow my mother down." The sound of an engine speeding up the long drive seemed to emphasize his statement. "That'll be Adrian," he told me, as I heard a car door closing. "Either that, or Nigel Mansell's come for breakfast."

I glanced at my wristwatch, surprised. "Adrian's normally still half asleep, at this hour."

"Well, we'll be starting to map out the ramparts today, and Peter was keen on an early start. It's a time-consuming process, but it shouldn't be too difficult, assuming that we really have a marching camp. We ken the shape a camp would be—we only have to find the comers."

I nodded understanding. Roman marching camps, and forts, and fortresses, tended to follow a playing-card kind of design—square or rectangular, with rounded corners. The Romans, being Romans, had imposed their rigid structure on whatever land they passed through, instead of letting nature dictate what design they ought to use. And so, as David said, once. any section of the rampart had been found, one only had to follow the predicted shape around to plot the whole site's boundaries.

There were several methods they could use, to do this. Adrian, I thought, could take his ground-penetrating radar equipment and ran it along inside the line of the southern ditch that we'd already found. Eventually, by taking measurements, his readings should show two marked anomalies, one at either end—two parallel blips on the computer map, to tell us where the eastern and western ditches had been. And then, by heading northwards along either one of those, he should be able to locate the fourth and final ditch, revealing the marching camp's outline.

David, when I asked him, confirmed that this would be their main approach. "But we'll probe as well, just to be sure."

Probing, I knew, was the tried and tested method—I'd seen a hollow probe used many times, to good effect. Though it sometimes could do damage to a fragile buried feature, most archaeologists relied on it to confirm the often ambiguous results of modem geophysical surveys.