The Shadowy Horses

I could barely wait for the evening meal to finish so I could make my retreat to the kitchen, spread some old newspapers over the table, and set to work again, carefully removing the ugly disfiguring crust of age to reveal the underlying glint of silvered bronze.

Conservation work always made me rather single-minded. I took very little notice of Jeannie's leaving, or of Peter popping in to say goodnight, and when Fabia came home a few hours later she found me still sitting there, deeply absorbed.

"You're mad," she said. "It's half-past one."

"Is it?" I looked up, blinking like a shortsighted watchmaker, and she shook her head.

"Mad," she repeated, moving across to open a cupboard. “Want some cocoa? I always have to have my cocoa, every night. My mother's fault. She was forever bringing me cups in my nursery, and now I can't sleep without the blasted stuff."

Fabia almost never mentioned her mother, and when she

did I'd found she tended to keep to a pattern—one brief reminiscence and then nothing more, as though a door slammed instantly to keep her mind from following after the small random memory. It scuttled like a leaf along an empty street and swirled off into silence.

I said, "yes please" to her offer of cocoa and bent again to my work.

After several minutes Fabia brought both mugs of steaming cocoa over to the table and sat down across from me, frankly curious.

"Is that what Peter found, this afternoon?"

"Mm. A phalera," I named it, shifting the partly cleaned disc safely out of range while I sipped my cocoa.

"What does it do?"

"Well, it's sort of a connector, if you like, for the straps of a horse's harness. You see these little rings, here, on the back? The leather straps went through there."

"Oh right." She peered more closely, pointing. "What's that little slot thing for?"

"To hang a pendant on. When this was on a harness, there'd have been a pendant hanging from it, a flat metal piece shaped like a wolf's head, or something like that. For decoration."

Fabia, with a dubious look at the corroded lump of metal at my elbow, remarked that she couldn't imagine anything so ugly being in the least bit decorative. "But then I've no imagination anyway. If I saw it in a drawing, maybe ..."

"I could do better than a drawing. I could take you down south this summer," I told her, "to watch a display of the Ermine Street Guard."

"The who?"

"A Roman re-enactment group. Their cavalrymen are brilliant, fully kitted out and everything, with replica saddles and harnesses. When those chaps come charging at you with the sun blazing off all those silver phalerae, you know how the ancient Britons must have felt."

"I'll take your word for it," she promised. "Being run down by Romans is not my idea of fun."

"It's tremendous fun, really."

"Didn't the Britons have horses, to fight back with?"

"Chariots."

Her eyebrows arched over the rim of her cocoa mug. "Chariots? What, like in Ben-Hurl"

"Didn't they teach you about Boudicca, when you were at school?"

"Very probably."

"Queen of the Iceni," I elaborated, with a smile. "A father fierce woman, who stomped all over our Ninth Legion, as it happens."

"Oh right. Peter's mentioned her, I'm sure."

"Well, the next time you're in London you should take a small detour to Westminster Bridge, right across from the Houses of Parliament. There's a whopping great statue of Queen Boudicca on that corner, charging about in her chariot."

Fabia clearly didn't think it a very practical mode of transport for the British terrain. "Must have rattled one's teeth a bit, running a chariot over this ground."

I agreed that it must have. "But they managed it somehow. The Caledonii—that's the tribe that lived north of here, up in the Highlands—even they had chariots, according to the Roman writer Tacitus."

She frowned. "Were there tribes here in Scotland, then? I didn't know that. I thought they were all one big group."

"No, they were rather divided. The tribe that lived here, in the eastern Borders, would have been the ... God, don't tell me I've forgotten it, I used to know them all..." Pressing a hand to my forehead, I struggled to sift the fact from my overcrowded memory. "The Votadini, I think. I'm afraid I don't know much about them, though. No one does. The Romans didn't bother much with this part of Scotland—most historians take that to mean the Votadini were a peaceful lot, no real trouble."

Fabia shrugged. "Or dead vicious." She took a sip of cocoa and rolled it around in her mouth. "Mind you, the Romans probably deserved it.''

"How do you mean?"

"Well, they were the invaders, weren't they? You can't just go around as you please, making a mess of other people's lives, and not expect some kind of retribution."

Only a twenty-year-old, I thought, could so neatly dissect history into black and white, heroes and villains. It was true that, to the Votadini, the Romans were invaders, foreigners, who had no right to be here. But on the other hand, those "Romans" had been settled here in Britain eighty years or so by then—at least two generations had been raised to feel that this was now their home.

I started to explain to Fabia that history could sometimes be more complicated than it first appeared, but she was in no mood to hear my argument.