A King's Comrade: A Story of Old Hereford

by Charles W. Whistler

"I would that we could find some place where we might hide the horses for a while," I said. "What is that yonder across the river?"

There was some sort of building there, more than half hidden in bushes and trees. Toward it a little cattle track crossed the water, showing that there was a ford.

"The track passes the walls, and does not go thereto," said Erling. "It may be worth while to see if there is a shelter there."

So across the ford we rode, with the trout flicking in and out among the horses' hoofs. The building, whatever it was, stood a hundred yards or more from the river on a little southern slope which had been once terraced carefully. Over the walls, which were ruinous, the weeds grew rankly, and among them a young tree had found a rooting. The place had been undisturbed for long years; and I thought that it seemed as if men shunned it as haunted, for of a certainty not a foot had gone within half arrowshot of it this spring.

We stood in the cattle track and looked at it, doubting, for no man cares to pass where others have feared to step for reasons not known.

"It is an uncanny place," said Erling; "which may be all the better for us. At any rate, we will go and look into it. Stay, though; no need to make a plain track to it hence."

The cattle tracks bent round and about it, and as we followed one it seemed at last to lead straight into the ruin. So we went with it, and found the entrance to the place. Last year the cattle had used it for a shelter, but not this, and there were no signs that any man had followed them into it. And then I knew what the place was, and wondered at its desertion little, for it was a Roman villa. Any Saxon knows that the old heathen gods those hard folk worshipped still hang about the walls where their images used to hold sway, not now in the fair shapes they feigned for them, but as the devils we know them to have been, horned and hoofed and tailed. Minding which a fear came on me that the marks we took for those made by harmless kine were of those unearthly footsteps, and I reined back.

"What is there to fear?" said Erling--"fiends? Well, they make no footmarks like honest cattle, surely. Moreover, I suppose that a good Christian man need not fear them; and Odin's man will not, so long as the horses do not. The beasts would know if aught of that sort was about."

Whereon I made the holy sign on my breast, and rode to the gap in the white walls which had been the doorway, and looked in. I suppose that some half-Roman Briton had made the house after the pattern his lords had taught him, or else that it did indeed belong to the Roman commander of that force which kept the border, with the Sutton camp hard by for his men. If this was so, the Briton had kept the place up till Offa came and burnt the roof over it, for the black charcoal of the timbers lay on the floors. Only in one place the pavement of little square stones set in iron-hard cement still showed in bright patches of red and black and yellow patterning, where a rabbit had scratched aside the gathered rubbish. Across walls and floors the brambles trailed, and the yellow wallflower crowned the ruins of the stonework everywhere.

One could see that there had been many rooms and a courtyard, bits of wall still marking the plan of the place. And in this one corner there was shelter enough in a stone-floored room whose walls were more than a man's height. The cattle had used that for long.