Gaius said simply, “I’m a stranger here; I don’t know your markings,” in the language of the tribes.
“Well, don’t worry about it; let’s get you out and then we can talk about how you came to fall in.” The young man slid his arm beneath Gaius’s waist, supporting the young Roman as easily as if he were a child.
“We dug that pit for boars and bears and Romans,” he remarked tranquilly. “Just bad luck you got caught in it.” He looked up at the pit top and said, “Let down your mantle, Dieda; it will be easier than finding something for a stretcher. His own cloak’s all stiff with blood.”
When the mantle had been let down, the boy knotted it around Gaius’s waist, then, fastening the other end about his own, he set his foot on the lowest of the stakes, and said, “Yell if I hurt you; I’ve hauled out bears like this, but they were dead and couldn’t complain.”
Gaius set his teeth and hung on, almost fainting with the pain when his swollen ankle struck a projecting root. Someone at the top leaned over and grabbed his hands and at last he struggled over the edge, then lay there just breathing for a moment before he had strength to open his eyes.
An older man was leaning over him. Gently he pulled away Gaius’s fouled and blood-smeared cloak and whistled.
“Some god must love you, stranger; a few inches lower and that stake would have gone into your lungs. Cynric, girls, look at that,” he went on. “Where the shoulder is still bleeding, the blood is dark and slow, so it is returning to the heart; if it were coming from the heart it would be bright red and spurting forth; and he would probably have bled to death before we found him.”
The blond boy and the two girls bent over, one after the other, to see. Gaius lay silent. A dreadful suspicion had begun to steal over him. He had already abandoned all thought of identifying himself and asking them to take him to the house of Clotinus Albus in return for a substantial reward. Now he knew that only the old British tunic he had put on that morning for traveling had saved him. The offhand medical expertise of that speech told him that he was in the presence of a Druid. Then someone lifted him, and the world darkened and disappeared.
Gaius awakened to firelight and the face of a girl looking down at him. For a moment her features seemed to swim in a fiery halo. She was young and her face was fair, but the eyes were an odd shade between hazel and grey; wide-spaced under pale lashes. Her mouth was dimpled, but so grave that it looked older than the rest of her; her hair was as light as her lashes, almost colorless except where the firelight lay red across it. One of her hands moved across his face and he felt it cool; she had been bathing his face in water.
He looked for what seemed a long time, until her features were drawn forever on his memory. Then someone said, “That’s enough, Eilan, I think he’s awake,” and the girl withdrew.
Eilan . . .He had heard the name before. Had it been in some dream? She was lovely.
Gains struggled to see, and realized that he was lying in a bench bed built into the wall. He looked about him, trying to understand where he was. Cynric, the young man who had drawn him out of the pit, and the old Druid whose name he did not know, were standing beside him. He was lying in a wood-framed roundhouse built in the old Celtic style, with smoothed logs radiating out from the high peak of the roof to the low wall. He had not been in such a house since he was a little child, when his mother had taken him to visit her kin.
The floor was thickly strewn with rushes; the wall of woven hazel withies was chinked and plastered with whitewashed clay, and the partitions between the bed boxes were made of wicker as well. A great flap of leather curtained the entrance instead of a door. To lie in this place made him feel very young, as if all the intervening years of Roman training had been stripped away.