I

“Admire the thrift of the ancients more than the luxury of the moderns.” The old man might have added, “Our own forefathers, it seems, never read much Varro”, but Publius and Rusticella knew their grandfather’s sentiment in the same way they knew the gravel of his voice. Nor did they have to look at the object of his gaze: the bathhouse that lay at the northeastern corner of their villa.

The three of them sat at the edge of a wood of beech and ash that defined the western boundaries of the family’s ancient estate. Their grandfather leaned against the trunk of an old fallen beech, cradling his heavy-headed walking stick with Publius and his younger sister perched by his side. The villa’s lands unfolded below them: fields marked with hedgerows, the stream vanishing into the woods to the east, and thin smoke rising from the adjoining village. Beyond all this loomed the mountains, their hazy form a constant presence against the eastern sky. The spot was one of Grandpa’s favourites, especially when he could amble there with his grandchildren to watch the swallows flitting to and fro in the late summer’s air. He had sat many times there with their father when he was a small boy, just as he had with his own father before him. “It has become our family throne,” Grandpa once remarked. And so it had.

Publius followed his grandfather’s gaze towards the bathhouse, the estate’s grandest building. “Grandpa,” he asked, “why do you hate the bathhouse so much?”

The old man snorted. “Why do you think, lad?”

Publius shrugged. “I don’t know. Because it doesn’t work anymore?”

In a cold, damp place like western Britannia, it was hard to think kindly about a nonfunctioning bathhouse. Publius often dreamt of soaking in hot water on a cold, rainy afternoon or lying down on a bed while a slave massaged his muscles with scented oils. Now, though, he couldn’t do anything more than imagine it, which didn’t bring much relief when the cold settled into his bones. No hot water had touched its brightly coloured mosaic floors since long before he’d been born. To Publius, it had only ever been a place of shadows, acrid odours, and of men busy in their workshops and by their blazing hearths.

“No,” replied his grandfather as he tousled Publius’s hair. “I disliked it long before that happened. In fact, I like it better now as a workshop.”

Publius had guessed as much. He had often seen his grandfather enjoying himself in the bathhouse, chewing the fat with the workmen or discussing the price of corn with the steward or debating with his father about how best to farm the villa. “That makes no sense, Grandpa.”

His grandfather laughed again. “That’s because you don’t pay attention. What is it I always say up here? Come on. You’ve heard it enough times.”

“Admire the thrift of the ancients more than the luxury of the moderns,” quoted Publius.

“That’s it. Now, what does that mean?”

Publius furrowed his brow, his young mind wrestling with the words. The baths were a marvel, everyone said so. Built by his ancestors to impress, they had once hummed with heat and laughter, the finest baths this side of Isca Augusta. His grandfather had told him as much—how the steam had risen like clouds and how the polished floors had shone. He had known those baths for many years before the legions marched away and the evil days of the marauding Irish arrived. But he was sure that even back then he had disliked the bathhouse. Publius couldn’t imagine such a place as anything but wonderful.

Before he could give Varro any further thought, Rusticella suddenly squealed, “Oh, look!”

Not twenty yards away, a stag emerged from the trees, its red coat shining and its antlers a crown of fierce beauty. It stood as though surveying the land, as silent and self-possessed as the woods themselves. Publius was transfixed. It made him powerfully conscious of the wood and the wild, and of an alien world governed by fear and forage and the thrill of the race.

He glanced back at the bathhouse. Unlike the stag, it stood out from everything else. For all their shared splendour, the stag belonged to the landscape in a way the bathhouse never could. In that respect, the creature was more like his grandfather—they were the kindred spirits in this scene. His grandfather’s abiding love for the land, tested by all Publius knew he had endured for it, made him worthy of the stag’s company. He could imagine them almost as friends.

With that thought, Publius finally understood his grandfather’s antipathy towards the old bathhouse. It wasn’t its purpose that upset him, but its out-of-placeness. It had been imposed where it didn’t belong. Erecting it in the middle of nowhere had been a way of showing off. Grandpa hates it because . . . Publius searched for the right word. Ostentatious. That was it. Grandpa hates things that are ostentatious, and that’s exactly what the bathhouse once was.

The stag remained indifferent to their presence for a few more moments before it sniffed, flicked an ear and swung its head slowly in their direction. Its eyes met Publius’s and held him in their dark gaze for a few heartbeats. Then the stag turned casually around and stepped back into the gloom. It could not have declared its unperturbed majesty more effectively than in that elegant movement.

Grandpa barked with laughter. “Well, blow me down! Not so long ago, we’d have said that the god Silvanus or Cernunnos himself had just paid us a visit. I suppose we can’t say that anymore, leastways not after our new priest arrives. Still, I think these woods have given us a gift. Treasure it, my dears. Treasure it.”

Rusticella hopped off the trunk, pirouetted and clapped as though the moment had transformed her into a wood nymph. Grandpa took her hand and twirled her around. Both had been animated by the stag’s presence, which seemed to possess them with the wild spirit of that late summer countryside, heavy with the cooling heat of the day.

But Publius remained spellbound. His grandfather was the wisest person he knew, but this time he was mistaken. For a moment, Publius had felt seen—not as a child but as part of something vast and unknowable. He couldn’t explain what that even meant. But he understood enough to know that the stag had not offered a gift; it had issued a summons. And somehow, Publius knew he must answer.

—

Ria’s face always seemed on the verge of laughter. She did not, in fact, chuckle or giggle more than anyone else, but there was something in the twinkle of her lively dark turquoise eyes and the rows of dimples beside her slightly upturned lips that usually made others want to. She had realized this about herself when she was still a girl and had come to shoulder that responsibility with a detached attitude, as though the delight she gave others was no more remarkable than the colour of her hair or the length of her fingers.

Her demeanour disguised a difficult start to life. Her mother, barely more than a girl herself, had died in childbirth. Her father had been an old scoundrel interested only in slaking his carnal appetite with no thought for its natural consequences. He had almost entirely ignored his daughter before having the good grace to be carried off by fever. And so Ria found herself, at the age of three, with no family to look after her.

For the next couple of years, she moved from house to house as the womenfolk joined in an undeclared yet fierce competition to mother her. Fortunately, Cadfan, the villa’s steward, perceived the danger and so set himself up as her father.

“You were a wild little thing when I took you in,” he was fond of telling her. “In fact, I used to call you my little polecat. Remember?”

But what Ria mostly recalled was being loved. Cadfan and his wife Ancarat were childless, so they had taken her in as their daughter, and she almost straightaway embraced them as her parents. Only much later did she work out that her adoption had saved them too. Before she arrived, they had yielded half-consciously to an estrangement of feeling. Each bore the frustration of their barren marriage alone and so came to possess their pain personally, even competitively.

“It’s a hard thing for a woman to be without a child,” her mother would say from time to time. “Hard not to deal with an empty womb by filling yourself up with shame.”

“What of Dad?” Ria would ask when they sat alone by the brazier on a long winter’s evening. “He must have found it difficult, too.”

“He did,” her mother replied. “But he was better at hiding it. He thought himself a failure, I think. Hard for a man who devotes his life to the fertility of the land to be shackled to a barren wife. But I think he blamed himself more than me.”

Conversations like this made Ria realize that her arrival had been a kind of manumission for her parents. Where they’d each borne the pain of their childlessness alone, now they could love their adopted daughter together.

“Your arrival saved your parents,” remarked the master carpenter’s wife once, while they were sowing seeds. “Probably saved the farm as well.”

“How so?”

“Your mother was no longer bound to her shame and your father to his resentment. That freed them both up to be good stewards of the villa. As simple as that.”

Observations like that burdened Ria with a sense of responsibility towards her adopted parents. The feeling of that obligation manifested itself in the paradoxical way she mothered them by being the daughter they so desperately wanted. Such was their need that they never once suspected it. In giving them the love they longed for, she, too, was nurtured—each of them quietly building the other up in love.

But all that had now changed. Ria was in love with someone else. And the object of her passion was not the man her parents wanted her to wed.

As she followed this path upstream in the dappled light of the wood, she gave way to her unhappy frustration. The love she felt for her parents was one she had always known—rooted, dependable, the kind of love that shaped the seasons of her life. But the love for him—the young man—was different, unsettling in its urgency, in its pull. There was no reconciling those two loves. She tried to distinguish them by naming the one sensible and the other silly, hoping that the first would extinguish the second. But no matter how she turned it, no matter what names she gave to the feelings that rose and fell within her, she could not change the truth: it was the boy’s gaze, the way he had looked at her that day, that made her heart quicken. The memory of his shy grin, which had sent a tremor through her, lingered like a secret she didn’t want to keep. And try as she might, she couldn’t deny that this love—wild, unmeasured—seemed to count more than all the reasons her mind could offer in favour of her parents’ wishes. It was a foolishness she couldn’t untangle, and yet, there it was, beating relentlessly against all she had been taught to honour.

With an exasperated sigh, she sank down into her skirts beneath a towering beech. She came to the spot regularly, especially in the spring when the wood anemone, bluebells or wild garlic carpeted the woodland floor and made the air thick with scent. But now she was too preoccupied to appreciate any of the late summer beauty that lay around her.

Rhodri, the man her parents wished her to marry, was neither ugly nor unkind. The thought of being his wife did not, in itself, upset her. She had known him all her life—had played with him as a child, and in the passing years watched him become a young man of quiet strength. He was the son of Owain the blacksmith, Cadfan’s oldest and dearest friend, and so was like a brother to her. Therein lay the problem, she thought. For in every other way, he was a sensible choice for a husband. The hammering of iron had shaped his body into something that seemed carved from the earth itself, a form so solid and sure it could have been sculpted in stone. And yet, despite a physique that had been hardened by fire and sweat, he possessed a quiet shyness that made him, in his own way, soft. So when her father Cadfan and her mother Ancarat had first proposed the match, she had not found the prospect disagreeable. Rhodri was a good and steady man. His skill at the anvil was already near that of his father’s, and his future seemed as sure as the work he produced with his hands. Despite not knowing if she could ever see him as anything more than the boy who had once played at her side, she had obediently accepted her parents’ intention.

That was before the Midsummer festival.

Ria had been eagerly anticipating Midsummer. It would be her first as a young woman, the first when she could join fully in the dancing, feasting and merry-making, and the first when she would pray with the other women for hearth and home. In the old days, mothers had made offerings to the goddess Vesta, but now that they were all supposed to be good Christians, the gifts went instead to Iesu. Still, the rituals remained largely unchanged—it was these rather than their divine object that held value.

Ria had risen early with Ancarat to help bake a loaf of bread, which they would leave at the wooden altar in the room where the household gods had formerly presided. Iesu’s table had been festooned with freshly picked flowers that stained the altar linen and obstructed the silver candlesticks Ria had carefully polished for the priest. Piled around it were loaves of every shape and size offered by the womenfolk for their families. As the old priest sat snoozing in his dotage and declining health, Ancarat and Ria made their prayers—Ancarat for protection and prosperity and Ria for fertility and abundance.

It was as they were leaving that Ria had first seen Brochfael, the shepherd’s son, in a new light. She had long known him, of course, but there was something in his demeanour, in the mood of the day or perhaps in her own prayers that had made her notice him in a different way. He had crossed Ancarat and Ria’s path as they emerged from the gloom of the chapel. Although he was carrying wood for the evening’s bonfire, he had too enthusiastically gestured a greeting, and the kindling in his arms did not so much fall as scatter like a disturbed flock of birds. He shot Ria a sheepish grin before quickly gathering up the wood and scurrying away faster than a whipped dog.

That grin was all it had taken. It caused her heart to do something it had never done before. She found herself thinking that she would like to see it again. In fact, she fancied getting to know its owner better and on different terms from when they were children. That smile intimated something about Brochfael she had never noticed before and couldn’t articulate. But she liked it. His grin looked to her as if it belonged closer to her own cheerful face.

“My child,” remarked Ancarat as they walked back to their home, “you look a little flushed. Are you feeling well?” All Ria could do in reply was to turn an even darker shade of red.

How magical that Midsummer festival had been! Ria and Brochfael gradually and bashfully gravitated towards each other as conscious of each other as they were of the gaze of those around them. Their awkward banter became their eloquence as they each groped clumsily after words of love neither knew how to express.

They danced instead. Movement, laughter, song and merriment served as their initial courtship. But as the evening settled into night and the drink continued to flow down the receptive throats of the merrymakers, Ria and Brochfael had withdrawn into their own world as they whirled around the burning bonfire. They eventually drew closer together until finally they nestled into each other’s arms in a dark corner by the old bathhouse and spoke falteringly yet sweetly to each other. Brochfael never tried even to kiss her. She recognized his restraint for what it was: not so much self-control as bashfulness, and she accepted it for the gentleness it implied.

He was gone the next day, back to the high pastures with his parents Baglan and Awen to tend the villa’s flocks. Since then, he’d returned only on occasional errands for his father. But each time he had devised a way to spend time with her. Ria had even once or twice risked a proper scolding by neglecting her chores in the villa just to walk a little way along the stream with Brochfael as he made his way home. It was during the last of these, in a narrow glade by a low waterfall, that he had finally kissed her, sealing with his lips the devotion that his words and attention had promised.

That was two weeks ago. Ria probably wouldn’t see Brochfael again for another week or so. But she knew that soon his family would lead the flocks back down to their winter pastures, and then they would have all winter to enjoy each other’s caresses and see how far their love could grow. That thought both thrilled and dismayed her. She would not willingly disappoint or defy her parents for all the money in the world. But for Brochfael she just might.

She was suddenly stirred from her sad reflections by the sound of a distant wail followed by a caustic chorus of crows. It had come from somewhere up towards the old forest in the direction of Empress Oak, too far for her to investigate further. Somewhere high up on the slope, someone was in anguish. She listened carefully for further sound, but none came except for the endless gurgle of the stream. She began to tremble. Only a great tragedy could provoke such a cry. It seemed to her to augur the approach of some great evil, as though it were the baying of a hound from the underworld. The wail had been unmistakably human, but to Ria it felt like the forest itself had given a cry of warning.

Fear banished all thoughts of Brochfael or her parents. Gathering up her skirts, she fled back to the safety of the villa.