‘You can’t have been the hunter,’ the girl said softly.
‘Why not?’
‘Because he’s still there. The hunter is still there. Still waiting. I can see him. He’s only a shadow, but I can see him. The hunter is there. He’s sad, he’s confused, and he’s calling to me.’
The girl’s hands were icy cold. Steven reached for her and after a moment she allowed him to take her down from the rock.
‘There’s no one there now. No one who should concern you. This is just . . .’
Just what? Dream? Fantasy? Imagination?
Before he could find a way to express his thoughts, Yssobel said, ‘I’m not imagining things.’
‘Sweetheart: in the world in which we live, imagination is everything. Of course you’re not imagining things. What you see is what you’ve made. With this . . .’ Steven tapped her head. ‘The hunter in the valley is not me. I’m here. It’s you. Do you understand me? Do you understand what I’m saying?’
Yssobel hugged her father. ‘Yes. Yes, I do. There is no such thing as a dream. A dream becomes life. You’ve told me this.’
‘Good girl. Five years old, going on twenty. Good girl. Now tell me: the hunter you can see, if indeed he is a hunter. The hunter in the valley. Does he have a name?’
Yssobel was silent, shivering. Suddenly she became strong again, pulling herself away from her father’s embrace. She was small and stout, strong and sturdy, and she walked away from Steven, towards the twin pillars that seemed to mark the entrance to the valley.
‘His name is resurrection. He is held together by his scars. And he needs to be healed of his wounds.’
Was this Yssobel speaking?
‘There’s no such name as “resurrection”.’
The girl was silent. She looked suddenly sad. ‘It’s not his real name. Anyway, he’s gone now.’
She came back to her father and took his hand, leading him away from the valley. They walked along the track that led to the villa, and Jack was waiting for them at the gates. The tall, thin boy looked anxious.
‘Gwin’s gone,’ he said. He always called his mother by her name. ‘She got upset by something.’
‘What do you mean, “gone”?’
‘She took the grey and a packhorse and rode through the east gate. I think she’s gone up to the old stone Dun, her father’s fort. But I’m not sure. She took Hurthig with her.’
Hurthig was a mute young man, a Saxon, strong from working the villa’s forge, with a good protective arm.
Steven was stunned for a moment. The boy had watery eyes. Whatever had happened, it had been upsetting for him.
Behind Jack, Rianna appeared, walking across the courtyard from the villa itself. She was one of several older women who came to the villa occasionally, and who were trusted to look after the children. She had come, with others, from Dun Peredur, the fort of Guiwenneth’s birth, and now a haunted place a half-day’s ride away. They lived most of the time in shelters along the edge of the river that flowed into the valley, but over-wintered in the greater company of this old Roman ruin.
‘I was at the river, listening to the water,’ she said. ‘Guiwen neth came to find me before she left. Jack is right: she is very disturbed.’
‘Did she say anything?’
‘Nothing.’
Yssobel whispered: ‘Is mummy upset?’ She held her father’s hand tightly.
‘I think so.’
She hesitated, frowning slightly, but only for a moment. ‘Is it . . . is it because of that man in the valley?’
Steven looked down at his daughter. She was strangely bright-eyed and brightly curious. ‘I don’t know, Yssi. I’ll have to find out.’
The Villa
Steven had discovered the ruined villa in the fifth year of his wait for Guiwenneth; five years, that was, as far as he could estimate. The valley itself was a dangerous place. He had had no horse. It took him many days to make the journey from one end to the other, and he was constantly aware that other beings were walking the same tracks: some shadowy, real and curious of him; others ephemeral, often giving themselves away only by their movements through the woods, or the disturbance of the river.
As he wound his way through the wide pass, he often saw boats or small colourful barges, floating down towards the stone. They were eerily silent as they passed, and as still as death, though sometimes a face would appear from beneath a cowl and stare at him forlornly.
He had always found some form of shelter, and manageable hunting, fruit orchards and wild crops, and the makings of fire.
He was not unaware that what he encountered was surfacing from his own memory. He tried to suppress the darker thoughts he carried. To think of romantic stone castles and armoured knights was to think of war. The brightest notion he carried was of a Roman villa, terracotta tiles, whitewashed walls, colourful mosaic floors in every room, a place packed with animals and laughing children; and with stores of grain and wine.
Some forgotten part of legend embraced such a farmstead, and one day he had discovered that it had formed there, at the top of the valley - though not exactly as he had expected it.
The outer gates were broken and rotten, the courtyard cracked and weed-infested. The villa itself was in disrepair. Most of the roof tiles had slipped and were broken, the mosaic floors of the ten rooms grown through with roots or scrubby trees. The two gardens, at the side and the back, were growing wild, though the trees were mostly fruit trees, untended, knotty with calluses on their bark, and thick with fungus. But still producing.
The gates faced the deep valley. At the rear, a field led to a steep hill, rising to thick wood. There was a small gate to what Steven called ‘the east’, and outbuildings to the ‘west’. All around, there were smaller valleys, leading away into smaller unknowns.
Several of the rooms were habitable and Steven spent time cleaning them, and sealing them against whatever weather this end of the valley might choose to throw against the place. After he’d cleared the gardens and the central courtyard of the square-shaped villa, the land began to grow flowers among the fruit trees, and it attracted bees, and wild fowl, and small wild pigs that rooted and ran when he approached but seemed almost to embrace the villa, as if once they had been a part of it, and their very tangible spirits were returning.
And people came too. At first just drifters, seeking shelter before continuing on whatever journey was taking them to their final destination. Once, ruins of this sort had been the living spaces of all manner of migrating peoples, after the Roman occupation of Britain had ended. Eventually the villas had fallen, returned to earth, been covered by new land.
Not this one.
Steven tried hard to locate some clue as to the nature of the family that had lived here in the centuries when the old stone and river gods, and the gods of hearth and home, had still been invoked. A family of four, he discovered: parents; the children a boy and a girl. And each had had their own sanctuary, a fact he surmised from the statuettes and wax remains he found; and each had had their own servants or slaves.
The villa had also been a place of horses. He found the collapsed stables in the woodland behind the villa itself.
There was one group of arrivals he recognised at once, having seen them when he had first entered Ryhope Wood. They arrived at night, waving torches to signal that they were there, calling out in a language of Germanic dialect with which Steven had become vaguely familiar. A man, a woman and a boy who didn’t speak, and they were called Ealdwulf, Egwearda and Hurthig. They had with them six scraggy and tired horses, on one of which was a leather bag containing the mummified arm of a tattooed man, a beautiful, ornate gold ring on its middle finger. The relic of their warrior king, Steven discovered later.
They were seeking a place they had heard of; a place of healing. They refused to say its name.
Steven smiled, thinking to himself: That’s a lot of healing.
But Ealdwulf and Egwearda stayed, and Hurthig grew, became strong and great fun with his antics, and told wild tales in mime from his own dreams. Hurthig seemed less concerned with the family’s journey than with his curiosity about the strange land in which he found himself.
And they were still living in the villa when Steven took his five-year-old son Jack to the head of the valley. They were still there, protecting and involved in the everyday routine of living in Villa Huxley, when Steven returned with Yssobel to find his son upset and confused, and Guiwenneth fled to her father’s fort.
‘Can I come with you?’ Jack was anxious.
‘No. You stay here with Egwearda. Have you finished the repairs to the drainage channels?’
The boy shook his head. It was work he hated and Steven knew that, but it had to be done. ‘I’ve seen him again. The old man. I’ve seen him.’
Steven had slung a saddle and supply sack over the back of one of the horses, and Ealdwulf had supplied a second. He was ready to go after Guiwenneth, but realised now that his haste was due more to concern for the woman than care for his son.
Ealdwulf took the horses to the gate and tethered them, and Steven took Jack to the shade of an olive tree, where they sat down for a while together.
‘Where was he this time?’
‘Across the river, standing in the shadow.’
‘Did he see you?’
‘He was watching me. He didn’t say anything.’
‘What were you doing by the river?’
Jack hunched down a little. ‘Just fishing.’
‘Catch anything?’
‘A rainbow. It slipped the hook.’
Steven waited for a moment, knowing that Jack’s disturbed state of mind was because of his growing obsession. ‘Was it my father? Are you sure?’
The boy agreed silently. ‘He’s very grizzled and very scruffy, but I can always tell it’s him. His eyes, the way he looks at you . . . it’s just like you. He stands and stares, then turns and disappears. It’s like he wants to come in, but can’t cross over. I feel sad for him.’
Suddenly alert to his father’s frown, Jack sat up. ‘I’m not afraid of him! I don’t think he’s dangerous.’
‘I know you’re not.’
‘But it’s as if . . . he’s lost.’
‘We’re all lost, lad. We’ve been lost since birth. We’re in a place of the lost. But you and I, and Yssi and Gwin, we’re alive, right? We’re alive. We live well. We can’t get out, but who needs to? When you’re older you can leave home and make of this place what you will.’ Steven reached an arm around his son. It was so hard sometimes to make joy out of their situation, to encourage in the lad a sense of belonging in a world in which they did not, truthfully, belong. And soon, no doubt, he would face the same difficulty with Yssobel. She had just forewarned him of that.
Suddenly Jack asked: ‘Is Huxley alive? Or just mythago?’
‘My father? My father is dead. The Huxley you see at the edge? Mythago. Yes. You’ve seen him in too many shapes and forms for it to be anything else. Some are formed by me, some by you, some by Yssi.’
‘Why does he haunt us?’
‘I don’t know, Jack. I truly don’t know. You have to remember: it’s only you who sees him.’
Jack took his father’s hand for a moment, holding it tightly, staring across the garden. ‘I think my sister sees him sometimes. She pretends not to. Do you want to see him?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I think that if he’d wanted me to see him he would have allowed it. As it is, I’m glad that my young man, my drainage-hating son, is in touch with a memory of a man who once meant a lot to me.’
‘Can I come with you to find Gwin?’
‘No!’
It was a good day’s slow ride to Dun Peredur, through difficult country. Ealdwulf rode ahead, heavily armed. Steven followed with the packhorse.
They passed through a change of season, and for a while were in a place of never-changing dusk. Sometimes they could see fires in the forest. But mostly they rode in summer and the day.
Steven still thought of time as minutes and hours, having been born and raised outside the wood. His body innately sensed the steady passage of time.
The fort was overgrown now; most of the buildings had collapsed or were ivy-covered. The gates were hanging on their hinges, and it was certain that Steven’s approach could be heard. Dun Peredur was a small fort: it had once been a crowded place, and there were signs of casual occupation everywhere, including the use of the place by wild dogs, which Hurthig had driven off.
The young Saxon had tethered the horses by one of the forges and was sitting close by, leaning back and drinking from a small jug. When he saw Steven he nodded to his right. Ealdwulf tended to the horses, then went to his son and crouched down to talk. Steven sought Guiwenneth in the chaos of vegetation and building.
She was sitting among the overgrown stone walls that had once formed the king’s hall, but she was sad, her knees drawn up to her chin, her fading red hair a tangle, partly of the feathers she wore in them, partly of leaves and sweat. She was anguished. Steven noticed she was sitting on the circular stone slab that had once formed the feasting table. She glanced up as he approached, smiled wanly, then straightened, stretching back, lying supine and gazing at the sky.
‘You’re not a happy woman, Jack tells me.’
‘I am not a happy woman.’
‘May the man who loves her ask what has happened to turn happiness into fear?’
‘Fear?’
‘You’re afraid. I’ve only seen it in you once before, but you’re afraid.’
‘I’m not afraid.’
‘What, then?’
‘Lost. Angry. Thinking of the kill.’
He was shocked by that. ‘What kill?’
‘The man who stole me! The man who raped me! The man who sent his guard to kill me! That Fenlander. Hunting me through the forest, in the snow.’
For a moment Steven couldn’t respond. Was she talking about his brother Christian? As if she had seen his confusion, as if she had guessed his own train of thought, she looked up and gave him the briefest of smiles. ‘He’s in the valley, Steve. The moment Yssi called to me from the valley, I sensed him too. It was like a knife turning in my belly. A storm of thunder. Silent, but terrifying thunder. I had to go! I couldn’t stay there, in the villa.’