by Alex Archer
She glanced across to see that the car beside her was the same guy who had flashed her a smile in the queue at the tollbooth. He slowed down and gave her room to pull across in front of him. This time she smiled back.
The off ramp she needed came upon her sooner than she’d anticipated, and almost disappeared into the rearview mirror before she’d seen it. It took a bit of emergency maneuvering, but she managed to cut across the chevrons painted across the road and up onto the ramp before she ran out of room, half expecting the driver behind to hit his horn in protest. But she saw the smiler was still behind her, still smiling.
It was just her luck he was turning off the motorway, too.
Annja followed the brown signs with the outline of a Roman helmet, indicating a tourist attraction, as the road took her through the outskirts of the city of Newport with its run-down houses and seen-better-days factories, before steering the car out into the countryside proper. The short journey from the motorway to the outskirts of Caerleon only took ten minutes or so, but the change of pace with the speed limit dropping by thirty miles per hour made it feel like so much longer.
The approach offered a spectacular view of the town and castle. An old stone bridge too narrow for two cars to pass side by side spanned the River Usk before the road swept right to a wonderful holly-and-ivy country pub. The place had a thatched roof that made it look like something that had slipped through a crack in time from the 1800s. It stood invitingly on the river’s bank, promising refreshment and a nice warm hearth. Just the sight of it brought on a sudden thirst and gnawing hunger so Annja decided to take care of both, even though she was only a short distance from her hotel.
The gently swaying sign had the gold-painted words Miller’s Arms and a crest. A smaller blue plate on the wall explained that the building was originally a sixteenth century coaching inn and lots of the oldest features seemed to have survived into its new life. It took Annja a few minutes to get used to the landlord’s accent as he offered her his very proud spiel, but after a while she found her mind singing along with the rise and fall of his speech.
“You from America, are you, then, me love?” he asked, pulling a bottle of water from one of the fridges behind the bar. She’d never heard anyone call her “me love” before; “my love” was more northern, but the “me” seemed slightly tortured. She smiled as he offered ice by holding a scoop over a plastic ice bucket but she declined.
“For my sins,” she said, taking a sip of the water, realizing just how thirsty she really was. The label on the bottle was in Welsh and seemingly unpronounceable, which she thought was cute. “Hope you won’t hold it against me.”
“We get quite a few of your sort through here over the summer, people coming to take a look at the ruins and stuff. That why you’re here?”
“That’s me.” She laughed. “Just another tourist.”
He reached to a dispenser on the side of the bar that was stuffed full of slightly faded leaflets about the various attractions and places of interest in the area and plucked a few of them out for her. “Then you might find these useful,” he said.
“You on a commission?” she joked as she glanced through them.
“Well, the museum is free, and so is the amphitheater, so it’s not going to make me rich. There’s a charge to go and look around the old Roman baths, but hard as I’ve tried to convince them, no backhanders have come my way.” He smiled again, showing he was joking, even if it wasn’t a very good one. “There should be one of their leaflets over there.” He pointed to another, larger rack that was perched on a low windowsill on the other side of the room.
Annja picked through the stack of leaflets he’d selected for her.
One was for the local museum, which was at the top of her list of places to visit, another about the work of Cadw, the body that looked after ancient monuments in Wales, and the third was a street map of the town. It was a decent selection; she’d already decided to examine them a little more closely while she sat with her drink.
Annja glanced down the small laminated menu on the bar, thought about asking what was good, then remembered something Roux had said about British cuisine—anything was good as long as it was brown. The Brits seemed to have a penchant for brown food, but she didn’t fancy a pie or battered fish or anything heavy, so she took a chance on a green salad.
“There’s a few tables free down by the river if you’d like to sit outside,” the landlord said as he wrote her order on a tiny pad of paper and tore the top sheet off. “I’ll bring your food out to you.”
“Sounds good,” she said, paying for the food and another bottle of water, then heading out into the sunshine. A haphazard arrangement of picnic tables and benches were set out on the grassy bank. There were a dozen large umbrellas fixed through the centers to provide shelter from the sun. Half of them were occupied; some with couples who were oblivious to anything but each other, others with couples who had clearly been together so long that they had little left to say to each other and others with men intent on filling every inch of space with empty beer glasses.
A mother fussed at a wasp that was buzzing around a small child in a buggy beside her. Annja thought that there was something about the scene that was so English but then corrected herself, remembering that Wales was very definitely not England and saying it was tantamount to a hate crime in some minds.
The water in the river seemed low, with steep mud banks on either side. She was staring at some kind of mud-wallowing bird she couldn’t name when the landlord appeared with her lunch. “Low tide,” he said as if reading her mind. “At high tide the flow slows down and the water level rises as it’s being held back.”
She’d forgotten how close they were to the sea and yet she knew that the Romans had brought boats up here from somewhere beyond the horizon. It was funny how the journey across the country could disorientate you. The landlord had moved on before she could reply. She saw him work with one swift movement, pulling a glass towel from where it had been tucked into the top of his trousers and flicking the troublesome wasp away from the child, earning a grateful smile from the mother in return. He stacked the unwanted glasses from the crowded table into a precarious tower and headed inside with them.
Annja marveled at him, not for his dexterity, but the way he seemed to be aware of all these different things going on around him and just dealt with them with as little fuss as possible. It was a skill. But then to do a job like this you had to be a master of dealing with the mundane as well as the surprises that might turn up.
From where she was sitting she could see the narrow stone bridge that had brought her over the Usk. Cars came and went, though the sound of the small amount of traffic didn’t disturb the tranquility of the pub garden or drown out the burbling of the river. A bird swooped and touched the surface of the water, snatching something up in its beak and taking to the air again. There was something beautiful about the motion. There was no violence, no brutality in the action; it had more in common with plucking fruit from a tree.
The garden was a little slice of paradise.
Annja spread out the street map that the landlord had given her on the table in front of her. The lightest of breezes tugged at the corners so she weighted the farthest one from her down with the water bottle and the half-empty glass. Back in the car she had a number of printouts she’d pulled off the internet when she’d been prepping for the trip, but here, now, this was so much more real.
She saw the river marked on the map in blue and the bridge that crossed it. The Miller’s Arms was also clearly marked on the map. She traced a finger along the road that continued past the pub, picking out the museum, the amphitheater and the Priory Hotel, where she’d booked herself in for a few days. Despite the relatively small scale of the map, she could count the number of buildings between the pub and the hotel on two hands, proving just how close everything was. It couldn’t have been
more than a couple of minutes’ walk.
She’d been eating without realizing or tasting what she’d been putting into her mouth and now her plate was empty.
Annja pushed it to one side, poured the last of the water into her glass before she folded the map back into its original shape.
A quick glance around her proved that life did indeed go on without one; the young mother with her wasp-fearing child had left, but at least the middle-aged couple still weren’t talking to each other. The group of men were working on another empty glass mountain. Time seemed to be passing at a different pace. She could easily have sat there for the rest of the afternoon and just let the world pass her by. After all, it wasn’t often life afforded Annja Creed the luxury of just sitting and thinking about nothing in particular other than enjoying what was around her for what it was.
She drained the last of the water from her glass, running her fingers on the outside to wipe the condensation away.
Another wasp fussed around her empty plate. But rather than dive-bomb her, it skirted the edge of her plate, obviously feasting on the sweet tang of leftover dressing, so she let it alone.
A wave of tiredness hit her from nowhere.
She caught her head lolling and realized she’d pretty much blanked out while staring at the wasp. So much for soaking up the warmth of the sun. She should probably check into the hotel and grab a few hours’ shut-eye, but if she slept it was unlikely she’d wake up again until the next morning, wasting the rest of the day.
She hated wasting time.
Chapter 6
The house was silent.
It felt strange to be coming home to an empty house. She was so used to Geraint being there. So used to him just being part of her world it felt peculiar that he’d stay in London even an hour longer than necessary. But he had.
Awena couldn’t wait to show him the fruits of her labors and, rather like the eager child she used to be, felt acutely disappointed she couldn’t do it straightaway.
They had shared the large house halfway up the mountain—looking down on every other house in the valley—since they’d been children, usually in the care of a housekeeper-cum-nanny while their father came and went.
That she could no longer remember what her mother looked like without looking at the few photographs they still had of her was a constant source of pain for her, but memories were like that. So much so she couldn’t be sure if the few she had of the woman were actually true or created from the stories she’d been told by her father. He’d even made her promise not to forget. Could she really remember the trip to St. Davids in Pembrokeshire on the west coast of Wales, when she’d barely been two years of age? It seemed unlikely, but the memory was in her head whenever she reached for it. The place was no more than a village, but somehow had been designated a city simply because some religious soul a few hundred years back decided to build his cathedral there. She’d been there many times since that first visit, of course, but it was the first visit she impossibly remembered. It didn’t matter, really, even if it was an imagined memory. So were the occasional flashes she got of her mother smiling down at her. Sometimes the mind was just being kind.
It had been a few years since the old housekeeper had lived with them. She’d been replaced by an occasional cleaner who ran the vacuum and a duster over the place a couple of times a week. And if necessary she could double as a cook if they wanted something beyond Awena’s culinary expertise—but those occasions were few and far between, with her father rarely coming home these days.
In the evenings it was almost always just the two of them, comfortable with no other company and never needing anyone else. It was how they had been for most of their lives. It was how she wanted it to stay for the rest of their days. Her greatest fear was that there would come a time when one or the other of them would feel the need for more, for that something their twin couldn’t give.
She wrapped the stone in the blanket that had kept her warm through the night and carried it into the house from the car.
It felt even heavier now than it had when she had stolen it from the museum, but then she had been fueled by adrenaline and urged on by the fear of discovery. Now there was no strength brought on by the risk of failure, and she was still stiff and tired after trying to sleep in the back of the Land Rover. She wasn’t good when it came to sleeping away from her own bed. She was a homebody. Besides being cramped, the back of the car had been stuffy and her sleep had been restless at best.
She felt an overwhelming sense of relief when she placed her burden down carefully on the scrubbed pine kitchen table.
She was hungry and thirsty and in desperate need of a hot shower and fresh clothes. But she was happy and that was the most important thing.
She tackled her needs one at a time: first, she spooned coffee into the filter machine, filled the reservoir with water and switched it on, then she headed upstairs for a shower. She knew that she would feel better after that, more alert and ready to face the day. Geraint was unlikely to be back from his trip until at least lunchtime. Like their dad he was always disappearing somewhere, but that was the nature of his job; people needed him to fight their technological fires. It didn’t matter if it was their websites, their databases, their security protocols or whatever else he did; if it was to do with computers he was every bit as much a wizard as Myrddin Wyllt. That thought led her to stretching out on her bed without even getting undressed, and pretty soon she’d drifted into sleep, all thoughts of showers and coffee gone.
When she woke it was well past eleven o’clock and the sun was glaring in through her window.
The heat from the shower quickly steamed up the small room. She stripped, shedding her clothes like a snake sloughing its skin, and stepped behind the curtain.
Needles of hot water stung where they struck, turning her skin red and raw, but the warmth made her feel alive.
She lathered up, luxuriating in the little agonies of the hot water, suds sluicing off her back to gurgle down the drain, and long after she’d finished washing she stayed beneath the spray, head down, her long red hair sodden and hanging over her face.
Finally, after more than half an hour under the flow with the water finally beginning to turn cold, she switched off the shower and stepped out.
She felt the sudden blast of cold air from the open window, but didn’t move for the towel. Instead, she let the air dry her body, then dressed in fresh clothes, her damp hair sticking to the clean T-shirt as she went downstairs.
The hot-plate of the coffee machine hissed as she entered the kitchen, the pot dripping condensation down the outside of the bell jar. She’d put enough water in the pot so that it hadn’t dried up yet, but there was only enough for one treacle-thick cup, so she poured it and focused her attention to the bundle on the table.
She didn’t unwrap it straightaway. She stared at it, like she half expected there to be nothing inside the blanket. Then slowly she eased back first one corner and then the next.
It wasn’t much to look at—a simple piece of stone with a hole in the middle.
It wasn’t the kind of treasure that made it on to TV shows. It wasn’t sexy enough for any of those. Looking at it, it was easy to see why it had been mistaken for a quern. Although a decent archaeologist ought to have been asking where the second offset hole was. Otherwise, how could they have inserted the stick to rotate the stone and grind grain between this stone and the second lying beneath it?
But it could have been the bottom of the pair, she thought suddenly, angry that she hadn’t considered it earlier. Her heart raced a little faster at the mere thought of it. She scrambled to get her fingers underneath and lever it up on its edge. Her fingertip snagged at the rough stone until she realized that she could use the blanket as a cradle to tilt it upward until it stood on its round edge.
With one hand on either side she ran he
r fingertips over either side, comparing them for differences in texture.
If this had been used for grinding corn, then one face ought to have been worn smooth as it rubbed against its mate. Both were rough. She couldn’t find anything resembling wear or weathering that she would have expected on a millstone.
Her hands were trembling as she moved them out toward the very edge of the stone, knowing that this was where she’d find the proof she needed to confirm that the stone had been used the way she suspected.
She moved gingerly at first, with the lightest of touches, then started laughing as she rubbed her hand across the smoothest of surfaces.
This was no quern; it had been used for sharpening blades, not grinding down grain. She knew that she was right. The only question that remained was whether this was the stone she was looking for, or whether it was just any old mislabeled whetstone, and she couldn’t work that out by touch alone. It would have to wait. Today was about showing her doubting twin precisely what she was capable of.
It had taken a while to convince him that she was right about the stone, and even then there was that gleam in his eye he got when he was humoring her. Thirteen minutes older than her, he liked to think that he was the dynamic force in their little family of two, but she was no slouch. And this would prove it.
She held the cup of coffee a few inches from her mouth, feeling the heat and breathing in the aroma, savoring every second of it.
* * *
BEFORE AWENA WAS able to brew another pot of coffee, she heard the sound of a car approaching.
Geraint coming home.
She wanted to rush to the door and hurry him inside, eager to show what she’d found. It was funny how life didn’t change—once upon a time it would have been showing him the new eggs in the birds’ nests or foxes in the woods behind the house. Now it was just a different sort of treasure. He’d always humored her then, always followed out to let Awena show him what she’d found and pretended it was the most interesting thing in the world, even if he’d already seen it. He was the perfect big brother like that. Or he had been. He wasn’t quite so generous now, a little less tolerant of her whims now they were older and supposed to be beyond flights of fancy. He wouldn’t chase her down to the bottom of the garden to hunt fairies anymore, but that didn’t stop her wanting to share her tumbling train of thought with him every bit as much as she always had.