Shadowy Horses (13 page)

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.

The probe itself was nothing more elaborate than a narrow tube of hard steel with a sharp bottom edge and a cutaway gap down one side, topped by a T-shaped handle that helped the user force it downwards, deep into the earth. Withdrawn, the gap in the probe's side displayed a core sample of the layered soil deposits. In our case, the dark silt that filled a ditch would show up very clearly against the surrounding soil.

It was tedious work, though, and ramming the probe down again and again through tangled turf and heavy subsoil demanded a fair bit of strength.

David flexed his broad shoulders and stifled a yawn, linking his hands behind his head. "It's a shame that Robbie can't go around and mark the ramparts for us. It'd save a lot of bother."

It was the first time I'd heard anybody tell me something Robbie couldn't do. "Why can't he?"

"Because he's not so accurate, with things like that. He has his hits and misses. Most of what he tells you he just gets at random, walking over things. If you ask him the right questions, he can tell you quite a lot. But if you push him, and he tries too hard..." David shrugged, dropping his hands again to reach for his coffee mug. "He's only a lad, not some kind of machine."

I studied him a moment, weighing my next question. Since coming to Rosehill, I'd grown used to David keeping his distance, polite and professional, his manner not inviting any personal intrusion. But Saturday in the kitchen with Jeannie, and now again this morning, he'd been so easy to talk to that I thought he might not mind if I just asked for his opinion.

"David ..." I found I liked the feel of his name, familiar on my tongue.

He drained his coffee, pulling a face at the taste. "Aye?"

"You're a scientist."

"Aye?"

"Well..." I steepled my fingers, and frowned. "How do you explain what psychics do?"

"I can't."

"But you believe in them."

He swiveled slowly in his chair, considering the matter. "That depends what you mean by belief. If you mean, do I accept the concept without question... no, I don't. But questioning things is the root of all science. Something happens we don't understand, so we test it, experiment, study the evidence."

"And is there evidence?”

“Oh, aye. You want to have a chat with a friend of mine who lectures in our psychology department, at the university. Did his Ph.D. mainly on parapsychology—he's been studying psychics for years." David's eyes touched mine, smiling. "He'll take you right back to the Oracle of Delphi, if you've the patience to listen. Thousands of years of reported occurrences. Mind you, it's only been since the last century that anybody took a scientific interest. The Society for Psychical Research, and all that. Flash cards in the laboratories."

I frowned harder. "But I still don't understand how Robbie—"

"Robbie sees things that the rest of us can't. You can test him any way you want to, laboratory or no, and you'll get the same result." He lifted one shoulder, dismissively. "It's uncomfortable, aye, when a thing won't fit into our orderly world, but then Western society's always been skeptical. And not very bright," he reminded me, wryly. "It took us till the sixteenth century to figure out the earth went around the sun."

He had a point, I thought. "So you're saying I should just accept the fact that Robbie's psychic."

"Christ, no. If we didn't have doubts we'd have no science at all, no reason to experiment. I'm only saying you should keep an open mind."

I promised to do my best. "And does the head of your department... what's his name? The one who's coming to lunch at the end of the month."

"Dr. Connelly."

"Right. Does he also have an open mind?"

"What d'ye mean?"

"Well, if we told him Robbie saw a Roman walking on the hill.. ."

"He'd have us all committed." David grinned. "No, we'll have to find some harder evidence, before Connelly will give his approval."

"I do wish we had more time."

"We've got two full weeks yet, lots of time. Besides, we're very close to something. I can feel it in my bones."

"You sound like Peter.”

“Aye, well, it rubs off on you, after a while. And I was howking with Peter afore I could walk."

"Howking?"

He shot me a mischievous glance. "D'ye not have your dictionary with you? My mother said you were fair having fun with it on Sunday."

I couldn't help smiling back. "Sorry, no, it's back at the house. What's 'howking"?"

“Digging. To howk something means to dig it up out of the ground." He lifted his coffee mug again and grimaced. "God, that's awful stuff. I'll make another pot. Did you want a cup, as well?"

"Yes, please, if you don't mind. Cream and sugar."

"Right." David rose and stretched to his full height before disappearing in the direction of the common room, and while I waited for him to return I carefully arranged the four new potsherds on my desk and bent over them, thoughtfully.

The furtive pad of footsteps broke my concentration.

I felt the hair rise prickling on the back of my neck, and glanced up sharply, seeing nothing. "Hello?"

No one answered. The silence stretched my nerves to breaking point, and when I felt the brush of cold against my hand I nearly shot straight up into the rafters. Recovering, I looked down at my hand and the thing that had touched me. A pair of liquid brown eyes stared back in mild inquisition, and Kip's long feathered tail gave a tentative wag. Collies, I thought, always looked so damned intelligent, and this one appeared to be weighing the wisdom of making friends with someone this jumpy and unpredictable.

Since I'd always liked the company of dogs, I settled the matter by scratching his ears. “Hello, Kip. God, you didn't half give me a scare. Where's your master, then?"

I could have sworn the collie shrugged, as if to say he didn't know. At any rate, I saw no sign of either Robbie or Wally, and when I went on stroking him the dog collapsed like a spent balloon on my feet, rolling over slightly to make his tummy more accessible.

"You'll want to watch him," David warned me, returning
along the aisle. "He'll stay like that for hours if you let him."

Adrian, coming through the main door, heard the warning and laughed. "Oh, Verity won't mind. She's a right pushover, when it comes to animals."

And crossing to my desk he set a covered plate in front of me. "Your breakfast," he announced, whisking off the cover with a flourish. "Jeannie said I was to be sure you ate it, seeing as you sneaked off without eating this morning."

Sighing heavily, I looked down at the heaping great mound of square sausage and fried eggs, rimmed with strips of toast and rounds of tomato. "But I never eat breakfast, you know that. A little toast, maybe, but..."

"I have my orders," Adrian said, setting down a knife and fork.

David grinned, and handed me my mug. "Here's your coffee."

"I'll give you five pounds if you eat this for me." I made the offer hopefully, but he refused to play.

"I've had mine, thanks. So, what did you make of the sherds, then?"

I moved the plate to one side, temporarily, out of the way of the four small jagged fragments of bloodred pottery. "Well, they're definitely Samian ware—a small pot, I'd think, from the degree of curve. Maybe two pots. This one," I said, touching one end piece lightly, "doesn't seem to match the others."

"And what date would you estimate?"

I chewed my lip. "Offhand, I'd say they're earlier than what we're looking for. But then again. .." Without the support of laboratory analysis, dating pottery could be a rather imperfect science. If the piece wasn't actually stamped by a known maker, one had to rely on comparisons to other bits of pottery dug up at other sites.

In the case of Samian ware my task was made somewhat simpler by the fact that German archaeologists had spent most of the last century studying and classifying artifacts found on Roman sites in that country, and had managed to work out a very useful and detailed typology of Roman era
pottery. The advance and decline of the Roman frontier in Germany had been so well documented by historians like Tacitus that archaeologists could say with reasonable certainty when each site had been occupied, making it easy to fix a date upon the bits of pottery found there. All that remained for me to do was to try to match my own sherds to a documented German find.

Again I touched the suspect sherd. It was a rim fragment, broken from the top edge of a pot or bowl. “This one ... I don't know, it strikes me as a later piece. I ought to ask Howard. A friend of mine," I explained, "at the British Museum. He's absolutely mad about Samian ware—knows the name of every potter. He could give these sherds a glance at fifty paces and tell us exactly what they were part of and when it was made. I could send him some sketches, and ask his opinion. And perhaps, if Fabia would take a few photographs ... ?"