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snorted like an aged ram. ‘And doubtless you will be picking out men of the Deva runs to herd these great new horses for you? Men that only know how to ride on a flat level and have
never roped a wild stallion among the rocks on a slope like a falcon’s stoop.’
    ‘You know the answer to that well enough, you sour old devil,’ I said; and then as he remained stubbornly silent, ‘Well? Will you come?’
    He lowered at me under the fringe of his shaggy sheepskin hat. ‘If I come to be your horse master in the lowland runs, who’s to take the reins here and handle these great new
breaking runs that you plan?’
    ‘Amgerit, your son,’ I said. ‘You know that he will take them anyway, when you grow too old.’
    ‘It is in my heart that I begin to grow old already – too old to be dragging up my roots from the mountains that saw me born.’
    ‘If you say so,’ I said. ‘It is for you to choose.’ And I left him to it. I thought that in the end he would come; but I could not do as I would once have done, taking
him by the shoulders and shaking him, laughing and threatening until I had his promise, because of the strangeness that had come between me and my own world; and I knew that he was as much aware of
the strangeness, the barrier, as I was.
    Young Flavian, Aquila’s son and my armor-bearer, was deep in argument with one of the herdsmen. I saw the white scar on the boy’s temple, heritage of a riding fall in his childhood,
when the night wind lifted his dark forelock, and the bright eagerness of his eyes as he drove home some point with a finger into the pahn of his hand; and the brown wind-burned face of the
herdsman, as vehemently denying the point, whatever it was. I saw Owain and Fulvius who had been boys with me and knew these hills as well as I did, as one passed the beer jar to the other, and
wondered whether they also felt the strangeness of their homecoming. I saw Bericus tossing a greasy knucklebone from hand to hand and watching the fall of it idly as a man playing right hand
against left watches the fall of the dice. I saw the farsighted hard-bitten faces of the herdsmen, most of them as well known to me almost as the faces of my Companions. I felt the harshness of
Cabal’s mane under my fingers, and the softness of his pricked ears; I listened to the calling of the curlews in the dark, trying to lay hold of familiar things again for a defense against
the desolation that had come upon me out of nowhere and for no clear reason.
    Presently somebody called for a tune, and a boy among the herdsmen, with a smooth olive face and warts on his hands, brought out an elder pipe and began to play, softly as a wandering wind at
first, then jauntily as a water wagtail, passing with little runs and trills from tune to tune, while the men about the fire joined in from time to time, or were silent to listen. Some of his tunes
were those of working lilts and old songs that we all knew; others, I think, he had made himself from something that he heard in his own head. A small merry piping, but it seemed to me that it
spoke to me with a tongue that I had known before I was born, and that Yr Widdfa crest itself stooped nearer to listen. And when the boy finished and shook the spittle from the end of his pipe and
thrust it again into his belt, it was as though for a few moments we all went on listening to its echoes.
    Then someone moved to throw more furze branches on the blaze, and the silence broke; and most of us had some praise for the piper, so that he flushed like a girl and stared at his feet. And when
the talk had turned to other things, I said to old Hunno beside me, ‘It is a long time since I have heard the music of my left-hand people among my own hills.’
    ‘Your left-hand people?’ said Hunno.
    ‘My left-hand people ... Half of me is Roman, Hunno. I think that is so strong in your mind tonight that you have wakened it in mine. My right-hand people are those who built squared forts