“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.

“This is luck,” said my comrade.  “Here we can leave the horses, and if one does happen past here before dark and spies a pied skin, he will but deem that kine are sleeping here.  After dark, who will come this way at all?”

“We shall have to,” said I, somewhat doubtfully.

Erling leaped from his horse and laughed.  “We may hide here for a week if we must,” he said.  “I think that the trolls have all gone to the old lands where men yet believe in them; and seeing that we are on a good errand, your fiends should not dare come near us.  I care not if I have to come back here alone to fetch the horses when you will.”

I dismounted also, for he shamed me, and I said so.  Then we tied the steeds carefully, loosening the girths, and managed to get a sapling or two from the undergrowth set across the door to keep wandering cattle out.  More than that we could not do, but at least the horses were safe till we needed them, and that would hardly be long, as we hoped.  They had well fed as I slept.

Then we went away from the ruin, passing behind it up the little slope on which it stood, meaning, if we were seen, to come down as if we had not been near the place.  And from the top of that slope we could see the walls of the palace, with the white horse banner of Mercia floating over them.  From the roof of his villa the Roman captain could have seen his camp, and maybe that deadly passage into its midst was for his use.  It led this way.