Free Gunner Kelly by Anthony Price

a great mansion in this grassy emptiness—a house with colonnades, and many rooms, and gracious pavements on which Orpheus had tamed his wild beasts in the lamplight, where generations of people had lived.
    And then one day … one night … this dream of a great house had turned into a nightmare, with the red flower of the raiders’ fires bursting out of the thatch of the out-buildings as the house died, signalling the end of civilisation—
    But it probably hadn’t been anything like that, he disciplined himself: the end would more likely have come much more slowly and ignominiously, with the original owners of the Orpheus pavement long gone, and their uncouth inheritors squabbling in the decayed ruins with invaders who were almost indistinguishable from them, but more virile.
    The bleakness of that conclusion roused him. Whatever way the Duntisbury Roman villa had gone down into the dark, it was of no importance to him.
    He blinked at Audley through the thick lenses of the spectacles. “That is a most interesting theory, Dr—Dr Audley.”
    Audley smiled. “Not mine, Mr Wiesehöfer. And not the most interesting thing about the Fighting Man either, to my way of thinking.”
    Benedikt looked at him questioningly.
    “He was killed close to the door—almost in the doorway. They know that because of the position of the post-holes left by the door-posts.”
    “So?” He thought there was something curiously mischievous in Audley’s smile.
    “So … how was he killed? And who killed him?” Audley paused. “Supposing the barn didn’t fall on him and kill him … and if it was just about to collapse he would hardly have gone into it … did some poor frightened little Briton stab him from behind as he went in—someone lurking just inside the door, say? Or did some hulking great German—I beg your pardon!— some hulking great Saxon or Jutish warrior spear him from the front, while he was defending the doorway like Horatius on the bridge?”
    Benedikt frowned. “But did you not say—or was it not Miss Maxwell-Smith who said … that he was a Saxon warrior?”
    The smile was almost evil now. “That’s what the experts think, yes. But apparently there were people called ‘ foederati’ in those days, Mr Wiesehöfer.”
    “ Foedus” piped up Benje suddenly. “ Foedus — foederis … ‘a league between states or an agreement or covenant between individuals’—that’s the noun … But there’s an adjective foedus which means ‘foul, filthy and horrible’—L ike foedi oculi means ‘bloodshot eyes’, like Blackie Nabb’s got on Sunday mornings—”
    “Benje!” snapped Miss Maxwell-Smith, suddenly much older than her years. “You mustn’t say that about Blackie.”
    “Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” Benje was not overawed by his heroine. “Dad says if it wasn’t for the Old General, Blackie ‘ud ’ave been disqualified from driving years ago—” he caught himself too late as he realised he had mentioned someone the memory of whom would pain her. “Sorry, Becky!”
    “My fault—” interposed Audley quickly “—I told young Benjamin about foedus and the foederati …. We were having a discussion about the Latin language, and we decided the Roman-Britons must have made a joke of it—how their new Foreign Legion of great hairy beer-swilling Ger— Saxon — mercenary bodyguards were a filthy lot, with bloodshot eyes, like—”
    “David!” Miss Maxwell-Smith treated Dr Audley with the same disapproval as Benje.
    “Sorry, Becky.” Audley accepted the rebuke meekly, as though accepting also that Mr Blackie Nabb’s drinking habits were now under Miss Maxwell-Smith’s special protection. “The point is, Mr Wiesehöfer, that there were these Saxon foederati who were hired, and eventually given land to settle on, in return for protecting the Britons against their own Saxon folk who came raiding.” He stared at Benedikt for a moment. “So … was our Fighting Man one of t he foederati