The Shadowy Horses

He looked old, suddenly, seen from a distance. Old and tired, and very much alone.

It didn't take me long to dress. My feet made very little noise as I crossed the dew-sprinkled garden to join Peter at the fence, but he heard me nonetheless. He half turned, showing me an absent smile of welcome.

"You'll catch your death of cold, my dear, coming out without your jumper."

"Nonsense. It's a warm shirt." I lifted a thick cotton fold to show him. "Besides, it's nearly June. One shouldn't have to wear a jumper, this late in the spring."

Peter accepted my statement with tolerant eyes that slid away from mine again to gaze across the field. I leaned my elbows on the crumbling bit of wall beside him and looked out, too. Long shadows feathered the far edge of the field, where another broad hill rose beneath a tiny, neat white farmhouse, but everywhere else the sun played softly upon the rippling grass. The field appeared serenely innocent, deserted.

Only both of us knew that it wasn't deserted. The Sentinel, I thought, might be standing on the other side of the wall this very minute, watching us ...

Hunching deeper into my sleeves, I quickly glanced at Peter. "Are you worried?"

"Hmm?"

"About this lunch with Dr. Connelly."

His smile was so faint I almost missed it. "He thinks the Ninth went onto Palestine."

"I see. Well..."

"Fragments of it, possibly. That's what I told him. Fragments of the legion, units, those who didn't perish. But the Ninth itself?" He shook his head. "They're here. I know they're here." Pushing himself away from the wall, he straightened with a sigh. "I only wish we'd found some scrap of evidence. Besides the ghost, I mean. Some concrete bit of evidence to put before old Connelly. I'd have dearly loved to knock the bottom out of his beliefs, smug bastard."

He spoke lightly, without violence, but I heard the bitter current in his voice. And suddenly I felt very sure that, whatever Connelly decided after today's meeting, Peter would have his excavation notwithstanding. It wasn't just the dream that he was grasping for, it was the more elusive garland that he'd worn when young, and lost along the way. Respect, I thought—that's what he wants. Respect and recognition.

I looked away again, and rested my chin on my hands. "We're bound to find something before the season's done. And anyway," I added, my tone brightening, "at least you'll have the satisfaction of telling Connelly we've probably found a vexillation fortress, where nobody knew there was one."

"Yes," he agreed, "I will have that. And Robbie did tell me, a long time ago, that our field would be full of people."

"There you are, then." My nod was happily certain. "It must have been the students he was seeing. So you've nothing to worry about. Robbie," I reminded him, "is always right."

"Yes." Peter's languid gaze was drawn outward once again, to the silent green expanse beyond the wall. "But with Robbie, one is never sure," he said slowly, "whether what he sees are shadows of the future, or the past."

"Remarkable." Dr. Connelly excavated a small trench in the middle of his creamed potatoes and pushed in a pat of butter, neatly sealing up the mound again with surgical precision. He was a tidy man, with spectacles, his thinning hair kept closely trimmed to match his still-dark beard. "It's quite remarkable," he said again, "that you've found anything at all. A vexillation fortress, do you say?"

Peter eyed him like a gladiator sizing up a lion. Or was it, I wondered, taking a closer look at Peter's face, the other way around? Still, when he replied his voice was smooth and cultured with no hint of condescension. "We have come to that conclusion, yes."

Connelly savored a mouthful of sole, and thought for a moment. "And is it then your theory that the Ninth Hispana came upon this fortress on their northward march, and made their camp here, and were then engaged in battle?"

"Yes."

"Interesting," Connelly admitted. "Unorthodox, but interesting."

Across the table from me, David shifted forward and assumed the role of spokesman. “We're fairly sure the fortress is Agricolan, and Agricola did bring the Ninth north during his campaigns. It's not so great a leap of logic to suppose that, forty years later, when the Ninth was ordered north again, it chose to camp where it had built before. The land is good here, near a river, and the ramparts and ditch would probably still have been standing."

Connelly's eyes were sharp behind the spectacles. "And have you proof, that this is what the legion did?"

I looked at Adrian, who looked at Fabia, and for a moment silence hung between us all; a curiously apprehensive silence, as though each of us expected the other to blurt out: "Well, there's this ghost, you see, who might just be a soldier of the Ninth Hispana ..." Hardly proof, I thought, for someone as meticulous as Dr. Connelly. Any man who cut his carrots into cubes before he ate them was unlikely to put faith in walking ghosts.

Fabia began to point out, rather huffily, that we had only been working on site a short time, but Peter cut across her in a ringing voice that sounded not the slightest bit ashamed. "We have no proof."

"None whatsoever?"

"None."

"I see."

Adrian's smile had lost some of its certainty. "We have prepared a brief report," he said, "that summarizes what we've found, in this initial survey. Perhaps, if you would care to look through that..."