Dawn Wind by Rosemary Sutcliff

had once thrown a copper coin at Regina to buy her off from braying after him in the street.
    Close beside them some steps led down into the ruined stoke-house, where in the old days a slave had tended the hypocaust fire. It was all overgrown now with brambles and the wreck of last autumn’s wild convolvulus. ‘Wait,’ Owain ordered, and letting go Regina’s hand, stumbled down the steps and ducked under the fallen beam that leaned slantwise at the bottom. Other debris had fallen across it, but the beam had held it up, and there was a small triangular gap left, filled with the blackness under the house floor. Bad air came from it, cold and dank, and he had no means of knowing how secure the beam was. Maybe they were going to be buried alive, but it was no time to be thinking of ‘maybe’. Next instant he was out again and reaching up for Regina’s hand. ‘We can get under the house floor—the hypocaust—Come!’
    He thrust her past him through the dark hole under the beam, and pushed Dog after her, then turned to draw the brambles and dead convolvulus stalks across the betraying entrance, and paused an instant, listening. He thought the voices of the hunt sounded fainter again, but that might be only the spattering of the rain and the walls of the house, blanketing sound. Then he worked his own way in, backwards on his stomach, pulling the last bramble spray across as he did so.
    A little grey light filtered through the tangle, but when he pushed himself further back and turned about, the blackness was like a tangible substance pressed against his eyes. Dog was licking his face as though he had not seen him for a month, and he reached out, groping into the dark beyond him, and found Regina crouching where the narrow passage-way opened out under the floor. ‘Go forward,’ he whispered, ‘right forward as far as we can away from the opening.’ And they felt their way on, between the squat pillars of the hypocaust, until at last they came to the blank wall of the house’s foundation, and there was no further to go.
    Nothing to do now but crouch in the wolf-dark, stretching one’s ears for any sound of the hunt from the world above. Better to lie down really, because if you sat up you found the floor above pressing on the back of your neck, and that somehow made it seem more like being in a trap. Beside him, Regina was pouring out her story in a sobbing whisper. ‘They must have been cattle-raiding into the Saxon lands, and they—I suppose they came because the Forum was somewhere to pen the cattle for the night, and I crept up close to see if there were any milch cows because—I thought we might have some milk—and then someone came up behind me and caught hold of me before I could run, and he laughed and—’
    ‘I know; I was there,’ Owain whispered back.
    ‘I guessed it was you that stampeded the cattle.’
    ‘Regina—’ he was not really listening to her, ‘Regina, they were British, weren’t they? Not Saxon?’
    ‘They shouted to each other in our tongue. I know because I understood them.’
    ‘Yes, that’s what I thought. British gone wild, like dogs that run away to hunt in the woods.’ Owain felt clammily sick. To be here in the dark hiding from Saxon raiders was no more than physical danger; to be here hiding from one’s own kind, broken men turned wolf pack, was a hideous thing, an uncleanness like leprosy. ‘Don’t talk any more,’ he whispered. ‘We don’t know how sound carries under here, and anyhow I want to listen.’
    But listening did not tell them much, here under the ground, and when once or twice they did catch a sound from the outside world it always came from the direction of the entrance hole, because that was the easiest point at which sound could enter. Once Dog whimpered, and Owain, his hand on the hound’s neck, felt the tremors running through his body, and wondered if danger was nearer than it seemed. But it did not feel quite like the quivering tension of the